The plight of our friendly neighbourhood bees has been well documented recently. With our bee population falling and the potentially devastating knock-on effect of the non-pollination of our trees & plants! I thought it time to visit my local bee-keeper to find out how our bees were faring.
I met with Dave Lantsbery from New Creation Farm who has been bee-keeping for over 30 years. He currently has forty hives over five sites which can produce up to one tonne of honey (2,240 jars). The bees forage nectar and pollen from a variety of flowering plants and trees, enjoying snowdrops and daffodils in the Spring through to dandelions, rapeseed and apple blossom during the rest of the year. As a result, the honey flavour will be slightly different depending upon the time of year and what sources of nectar the bees have been feeding on. The honey made at New Creation Farm is predominantly made from rapeseed nectar which is high in sugar. Bees can only produce honey when plants are flowering and their nectar can be extracted. The main honey producing season runs from mid-April until the end of July.
Throughout the ages, honey has been cherished for its restorative powers. Today, it is widely believed that the consumption of locally-produced honey can combat the symptoms of asthma and hay fever. By eating local honey you ingest and acclimatise to the pollen from your local area. The pollen present in local honey helps the body build up an immunity to airborne pollen which causes hay fever.
The vast majority of bees in the UK are cross breeds, being a mixture of both indigenous and imported bees. The colour and temperament can be variable. Some of the bees at New Creation Farm were bad tempered and prone to stinging. To combat this, Dave has started a queen bee breeding programme using the queen from a friendly colony of bees to produce other queens which can then be implanted into the hives of less friendly colonies. The queen will lay up 2,000 eggs per day at peak production during May (mid Spring) then producion begins tailing off. Each hive will have between 50-60,000 bees made up of several hundred drones; male bees whose major function is to mate with the young queens. The remaining colony is made up of female worker bees. The workers’ role changes throughout their adult life . They begin by feeding the larvae and then move onto cleaning and constructing the wax comb cells. Next, they have a spell serving as guards at the hive entrance before being allowed to go off to forage for nectar and pollen. Honeybees then turn the nectar into honey and either store or feed the pollen to their larvae. Worker bees get rather a raw deal as, after all their hard work, they then die at around 6 weeks after birth!
One of the main risks to any hive is the varroa mite which is present in most hives and needs constant attention. The varroa mite feeds on developing pupae and needs to be eradicated using chemicals and cutting out effected areas.
The honey is ready to be harvested when the bees have capped over the honey with wax. There are various extraction methods, from cutting the comb into pieces and selling them unprocessed, to spinning the honey out of the comb to produce a runny combless honey. New Creation Farm use a heat method, the combs are cut out of their frames and then placed on-top of a flat metal tray which has a water bath underneath heated to 70°-80°. Both the honey and wax then melt and are run off into separate collection chambers. The honey is then strained through muslin and bottled. The wax is collected in discs and is generally used as currency to buy new bee-keeping equipment.
The bee population at New Creation Farm is thriving and getting less bad tempered by the day! After a good Spring with lots of nectar-rich blossom, it looks like there will be a good crop of luscious honey for us all to enjoy!
