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Alnwick Training Apiary - continued
Alnwick Training Apiary Editorial
A Winters tale
A years work
2004 A year of Swarms and wasps
Get the buzz
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Get the buzz
Location: Northumberland
Honeybees are arguably the most useful animals in the world. They are the major pollinators of flowering plants, which feed many of the world’s terrestrial animals and provide the planet with oxygen.
They are also responsible for providing us with honey, wax and royal jelly. Beekeepers, or apiarists, have learnt to exploit these valuable resources.
With the help of the LHI, efforts are being made in Northumberland to reverse the bee’s decline. The Alnwick and District Beekeeping Association is encouraging people to take up beekeeping by providing hives and training. The more beekeepers there are, the more bees there are, and that can only be a good thing for everyone.
Bees make honey by mixing nectar with enzymes produced from glands in their mouths. The mixture is then stored in hexagonal wax honeycombs until the water content reduces, after which the honeycomb is sealed with a thin layer of wax.
Beekeepers can then remove the honeycomb from the hive and extract the honey using the centrifugal force of a spinning machine.
Collecting honey from hives does not harm the bees. They produce honey during the summer to get them through the winter. Honeybees do not hibernate like bumblebees and wasps, so they need food to survive. An average hive of bees need about 9-13kg of honey to survive the winter, but they have the ability to make much more. This is what the beekeeper encourages them to do. A good hive may produce 30kg of surplus honey, although about 9-14kg above what the bees need to survive the winter is typical.
There are three types of honeybees in the hive: female workers, male drones and the queen. The queen’s job is to lay eggs – she is the only female who is allowed to reproduce. She lays over 2000 eggs a day! The queen constantly emits pheromones (a perfumed hormone) that lets the rest of the bees know that all is well in the hive, keeping the colony together.
The sole purpose of the drones is to mate with the queen, and the males die straight after mating. The phrase ‘busy as a bee’ undoubtedly refers to the workers. They get to work as soon as they are born; feeding the larvae, building honeycombs, producing wax, collecting pollen, nectar and water, and guarding the hive. Scientists were amazed to discover that worker bees perform a ‘waggle dance’ to let other bees in the hive know the whereabouts of good food sources. By wiggling their bodies in a particular way, they can pass info about the distance, direction, type and even quality of food up to 100m away.
In the summer there are about 40,000 bees in the hives, but this drops to about 5,000 during the winter, mainly because this is when the drones are pushed out of the hive to conserve resources.
Although humans have collected honey from wild bees since as long as we’ve been walking the Earth, beekeeping in Britain began in medieval times. Beekeeping now is just as important as it was all of those years ago. The British honey industry is worth about £13m a year, and honeybees are responsible for pollinating about £700bn worth of agricultural crops. However, in recent years honeybees have come under attack from the Varroa mite. This parasite has had a devastating effect on the honeybee population, destroying up to half of the UK's hives.
By Xanthe Pamboris
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