Beekeeping For Dummies, UK Edition

Chapter 1

To Bee or Not to Bee?

In This Chapter

Appreciating the many benefits of beekeeping

Admiring the honey bee’s vital role in nature

Deciding whether beekeeping is for you

Dealing with stings

When you have your own bees, you become very protective of them. You spare no effort to cater for their every need through your first season and make sure that you’ve done everything possible to see them safely tucked up for winter. Then you wait anxiously until you see them flying again the next spring.

Personally, we can’t wait until the weather’s warm enough to open the hives for the first time to see how well they’ve come through winter. And if a hive has died out, we have a real sense of loss when we remember all the work the bees did to produce their honey crop.

You can’t help being fascinated by bees when you observe them at close quarters. Over time you see them doing their waggle dances, feeding the queen, building comb, bringing in pollen, fanning at the hive entrance and emerging from their cells; you’ll be amazed at their industry and organisation.

In this chapter, we help you to understand the remarkable and bountiful little honey bee by looking at its history and the value that it brings to our lives. We also discuss the benefits of beekeeping and why you should consider it as a hobby – or even a small business venture. This chapter gives you an idea of what equipment you need to get started, the time you can expect to spend maintaining a healthy hive and how deep your pockets need to be. We also discuss the optimal environmental conditions for raising bees and end by helping you decide if beekeeping is really for you.

The prehistoric bee

Bees have been around for a long, long time, gathering nectar and pollinating flowers. They haven’t changed much since the time of the dinosaurs. The insect shown here is definitely recognisable as a bee. It was caught in a flow of pine sap 30 to 40 million years ago and is forever preserved in amber. Bee-utiful!

Courtesy of Mario Espinola

Discovering the Benefits of Beekeeping

Why has mankind been so interested in beekeeping over the centuries? The first motivator was surely honey. After all, for many years and long before sugar, honey was the primary sweetener in use. Honey probably remains the principal draw for many hobby beekeepers. Chapters 13 and 14 deal with how to produce, harvest and market your honey.

But the sweet reward is by no means the only reason people are attracted to beekeeping. For a long time, farmers have recognised the value of pollination by bees. Without the bees’ help, many commercial crops would suffer serious consequences. Even hobby beekeepers witness dramatic improvements in their gardens’ yields: more and larger fruit, flowers and vegetables. A hive or two in the garden makes a big difference to your success as a gardener.

The rewards of beekeeping extend beyond honey and pollination. Bees produce other products that can be harvested and put to good use, including beeswax, propolis (the gooey material bees gather from trees and plants to strengthen and sterilise the hive) and royal jelly (a substance secreted by bees to feed their brood). Even the pollen bees bring back to the hive can be harvested; pollen’s rich in protein and makes a healthy food supplement in our own diets.

Harvesting liquid gold: Honey

The prospect of harvesting honey is certainly a strong attraction for new beekeepers. Bottling your own honey is magical. And no other honey tastes as good as the honey made by your own bees. Be sure to have a look at Chapter 17, where we list some delicious recipes for cooking with honey.

How much honey can you expect? The answer to that question varies, depending on the weather, rainfall and the location and strength of your colony. But producing 27 to 36 kilograms (60 to 80 pounds) or more of surplus honey isn’t unusual for a single colony, although around 14 kilograms (30 pounds) is the average. Chapters 13 and 14 provide plenty of useful information on the kinds of honey you can harvest from your bees and how to go about it, plus some suggestions on how you can go about selling your honey. How many hobbies can boast a profitable return on investment?

Bees as pollinators: Their vital role in ensuring our food supply

Any gardener recognises the value of pollinating insects. Various insects perform an essential service in the production of seed and fruit. The survival of plants depends on pollination. In fact, 60 per cent of the fruit and vegetables we eat need honey bee pollination. French and German environmental research centres estimate the economic impact on agriculture worldwide from loss of pollination, mainly by honey bees, at around £119 billion a year. That represents about 9.5 per cent of the value of world agricultural human food production. Put simply, one mouthful of every three of the food we eat comes from plants pollinated by bees. These realities are more than simply interesting facts, they have potentially devastating consequences. The dwindling population of honey bees in recent years (see the later section ‘Helping the bees; helping the environment’) underscores the value of bee pollination. Indeed, a spring without bees could endanger our food supply and impact our economy.

We’ve witnessed the miracle in our own gardens: more and larger flowers, fruit and vegetables as the result of more efficient pollination by bees. And they don’t just pollinate our gardens. Neighbours benefit too. A nearby smallholder asked if I (David) would put some hives on his land. Although I explained that my bees were close enough already to pollinate his crops, he badly wanted bees as part of his set-up. So I set up some hives in a secure and accessible site and every year I show my appreciation with a gift of honey. A good arrangement for both of us.

Why bees make great pollinators

Many crops in the UK depend on bees for pollination. Why is the honey bee such an effective pollinator? Because she’s uniquely adapted to the task. Here are several examples:

The honey bee’s anatomy is well suited for carrying pollen. Her body and legs are covered with branched hairs that catch and hold pollen grains. The bee’s hind legs contain pollen baskets that the bee uses for transporting pollen, a major source of food, back to the hive. If the bee brushes against the stigma (female part) of the next flower she visits and brushes off some of the pollen grains, the act of cross-pollination is accomplished.

Most other insects lie dormant all winter and in spring emerge only in small numbers until increasing generations have rebuilt the population of the species. Not the honey bee. Its hive is perennial. The honey bee overwinters, with large numbers of bees feeding on stored honey. Late in winter (usually mid-January), the queen begins laying eggs, and the already large population explodes. When flowers begin to bloom, each hive has tens of thousands of bees to carry out pollination activities. By mid-summer, an individual hive contains up to 60,000 bees.

The honey bee has a unique habit that’s of great value as a pollinator. It tends to forage on blooms of the same kind, as long as they’re flowering. In other words, rather than hopping from one flower type to another, honey bees are flower-consistent making for particularly effective pollination. Consequently, the honey they produce from the nectar of a specific flower takes on the unique flavour characteristics of that flower, giving specific honey flavours, such as orange blossom, buckwheat, blueberry, lavender and so on. In Britain, we don’t have the vast acreages of single crops to produce specific honeys, apart from oil seed rape and heather.

The honey bee is one of the only pollinating insects that can be introduced to a garden at the gardener’s will. You can garden on a hit-or-miss basis and hope that enough wild bees are out there to achieve adequate pollination or you can nestle a colony of honey bees in a corner of your garden.

Helping the bees; helping the environment

The facts that keeping a hive in the garden dramatically improves pollination and rewards you with a delicious honey harvest are by themselves good enough reasons to keep bees. But today, the value of keeping bees goes beyond the obvious. In many areas, millions of colonies of wild (or feral) honey bees have been wiped out by urbanisation, pesticides, parasitic mites and a recent phenomenon in America called Colony Collapse Disorder (see Chapter 10 for more information on CCD). Collectively, these challenges are devastating the honey bee population. Many gardeners ask why they now see fewer and fewer honey bees in their gardens. The reason is the dramatic decrease in our honey bee population. Hobby beekeeping has become vital in our efforts to re-establish lost colonies of bees and offset the decrease in pollination by wild bees. Many people have started beekeeping just to help re-build the honey bee population.

Passing on your knowledge

As a beekeeper, you continually discover new things about nature, bees and their remarkable social behaviour. Beekeepers are enlisted by schools, clubs and other organisations to give talks and run courses for beginners. We frequently open our hives for family and friends to marvel at the bees at work. Spreading the word to others about the value these little creatures bring to all of us is really rewarding. Right at the start of my (David’s) beekeeping career, I...