Honey bees are vitally important on the smallholding, as they are one of the most important pollinators. It is estimated that honey bees pollinate one-third of our food crops, and they are especially valuable if you have an orchard. Of course the other reason to keep bees is for their honey!
Keeping bees is not as simple as going out and buying a few hens and a hen house. During the summer months a lot of time and effort goes into keeping the bees healthy and preventing them from swarming, while extracting the honey is hard work. But beekeeping certainly has its rewards: apart from the bees’ value as pollinators, a productive hive can produce around 10kg (22lb) of honey a year – and there are other bee products too, such as beeswax, propolis and royal jelly.
You need to have a fair amount of knowledge to keep bees successfully. So before rushing out and buying your hive and equipment, you should attend a course about beekeeping. Even then, it is recommended that you get your bees only once you have a mentor who can guide you through the first couple of years, or you could join a local beekeeping society, who can provide support (see Resources). Membership of a club will give you access to a wealth of knowledge, updates on disease in your area and how to deal with it, and possibly some free insurance and loan of specialist kit.
If you can’t spare the time that is needed for beekeeping each week, then another option is to allow beekeepers to keep their hives on your holding. That way you can enjoy the bees and their benefits without all the hard work – and get some honey as rent!
The following is just a brief introduction to the extensive subject of beekeeping, outlining the life cycle of bees and the type of kit you will need to buy in order to get started.
Other bees
Honey bees are not the only bees that you will spot on your plot, as there are a number of species of bumblebees and solitary bees that will be attracted to the fruit blossom and other flowers.
A colony of honey bees typically numbers up to 60,000 bees. It is made up of a queen bee, a thousand or so drones, and the rest are worker bees.
Worker bees are female. They live for about 6 weeks and have various jobs in the colony. Each worker’s job is related to her age. As young workers they stay in the hive, nursing the larvae, keeping the hive clean, building and repairing the honeycomb and regulating the temperature of the hive. If it’s too hot, they beat their wings to ventilate the hive, while in the colder months, they will huddle together to generate heat.
The older workers are the foragers. They leave the hive to gather nectar and pollen, which is brought back to the hive in special pollen baskets on their hind legs. They will fly more than 5km (over 3 miles) from the hive in their search for food. When they return, they hand over the pollen and nectar to other workers. Honey is made by evaporating the water from nectar and is then stored in cells within the wax comb. Each comb is made up of hundreds of these cells, which are hexagonal in shape.
Drones are males. They are large bees with a distinctive head and long wings that reach to the end of their abdomen. They lack a sting. Drones are cared for by the worker bees and their only job in the colony is to fertilize the queen, then they die. Any drones still present in the hive at the end of summer are forced out by the workers.
The most important bee in the colony is the queen. She is a large bee, about three times the size of a worker, with long wings and a small head. She can live for several years. The queen is fed, cared for and protected by the worker bees, and her only role is to reproduce. The queen controls the colony through the release of chemicals called pheromones.
When an old queen weakens, the workers start the process of replacing her, which is called supersedure. A few newly hatched larvae are picked to become a queen, and these are fed royal jelly. Royal jelly is a white substance made by the workers from pollen and glandular secretions rich in nutrients and vitamins, and it fuels the larvae’s growth. Supersedure will also take place if the queen dies unexpectedly.
The new queens fight among themselves and eventually only one remains. She then leaves the hive with the drones and goes on her nuptial (mating) flight. She mates with several drones during the flight, and in the process accumulates sufficient sperm to fertilize eggs for the rest of her life. Once she has mated she returns to the hive, where she lays up to 2,000 eggs a day, one egg per cell. Each egg is the size of a grain of rice. Fertilized eggs become workers and occasionally queens, while unfertilized eggs hatch into drones.
This queen bee, in the centre, has been marked by the beekeeper so she is easily spotted on the frame.
The eggs hatch into larvae, or grubs. The larvae remain in their cells, where they are fed and cared for by the worker bees. The cells are sealed by the workers once the larvae are ready to pupate and metamorphose into adults. A new worker bee emerges after 21 days, a drone after 24 days and a new queen after just 16 days.
Social organization
The social structure of the colony depends on a complex system of communication, both visual and chemical. Hormone-like chemicals called pheromones are released by the queen to unify the colony and give it an identity. She releases a specific blend of pheromones called the ‘queen signal’, which maintains her supreme position, suppressing the rearing of any other queen and preventing worker bees from reproducing. When she dies or weakens, the loss of this signal results in workers raising some new queens.
The workers communicate the location of food sources through the ‘waggle dance’, which indicates the direction and distance other workers should fly when they leave the hive on a foraging trip.
In the wild, a colony of honey bees would make its nest in hollow trees and cavities in buildings. A hive is similar, in that it’s a structure that is hollow, but has been designed to make the management of the colony easier. Around the world there are a number of hive designs – for example the Langstroth, popular in Australia and North America; the WBC, with its classic hive shape; and the National, which is a favourite in the UK. However, they all have the key parts in common, namely the roof or outer cover, crown board or inner cover, honey supers, queen excluder, brood box or chamber, bottom board and stand.
Inside the brood box and supers are frames, which hang vertically inside them. Each frame has a wax sheet that the bees use as a foundation layer on which to build their wax comb.
The colony lives in the brood box, which is where the queen lays her eggs. Some of the cells are filled with pollen and honey and provide an easily accessible food source for the queen, drones and workers.
The supers and the frames within them are usually shallower than the brood box. It is here that the worker bees store honey. They fill the cells with honey and add a cap of wax to keep it in. It is the honey in the supers that the beekeeper harvests. You will need a number of supers. In late spring, when the ‘flow’ starts, the frames in the first super will quickly fill up, so you need to keep adding extra ones on top to provide more space for honey storage. A queen excluder is placed between the brood box and the honey supers, so the queen bee does not crawl up into the super and start laying eggs.
The bottom board is usually placed on a stand so that the hive is off the ground and easier to handle. Many beekeepers opt for a screened bottom board with a mesh floor, which provides good ventilation for the hive – something that is essential for healthy bees. It also allows any debris from the cells to drop out of the hive. The front of the bottom board is cut away to form the entrance for the bees. The roof or outer cover provides protection from the rain and helps to insulate the hive in winter.
The parts of a National hive.
In this apiary, the two hives on the left have large colonies and contain a number of supers full of honey.
As well as a hive, you will need some protection in the form of a bee suit with veil and gloves. You can opt either for a veil with a jacket or, for greater protection, a veil with a full suit. You can buy leather gloves, but cheap rubber gloves are just as good. You will also need a smoker, which, as the name suggests, produces smoke that is used to calm the bees when you inspect the hive. Rolled-up cardboard or chips of wood are burnt inside the smoker, and the smoke can be puffed into the hive entrance. You will also need a hive tool: a flat metal bar that you use to prise apart bits of the hive. Bees stick everything together with propolis, making it difficult to lift off parts of the hive, hence the tool. Other extras include a bee brush or a large goose feather, to brush bees off a frame, a toolbox in which to place all your bits and pieces, a marking kit and possibly a queen catcher.
There is one other piece of equipment that you may need, and that’s an extractor. It’s an expensive piece of kit, used to extract the honey from the frames at the end of summer. You can extract the honey manually, but it is a time-consuming and very messy job. The extractor spins the frames and the honey drains out and is collected at the bottom. There are cheaper plastic extractors available online, but if you belong to a local beekeeping association you may be able to hire a good-quality one.
Bee conservation
Around the world, bees are under threat. Not only are they affected by harmful parasites such as the varroa mite, but there are new pesticides that present a deadly risk. This group of pesticides, called neonicotinoids, is used to protect crops such as oilseed rape from the flea beetle. They are systemic pesticides, used to treat the seeds, so the whole plant is impregnated with the chemical, including the pollen. The use of this class of pesticides is now known to be having a devastating effect on bees. They are neurotoxins and cause the bees to be disoriented and colonies to fail. Both neonicotinoids and the varroa mite are associated with the mysterious and alarming ‘colony collapse disorder’ – the unexplained disappearance of whole colonies of bees across North America and Europe. Neonicotinoids are now banned in some countries, but sadly are still in use elsewhere.
Ideally, your hive should be placed in an area that is not cultivated, so there is less disturbance on a daily basis, such as a corner of a pen not used for livestock or cultivation. But don’t forget that a honey-filled super is very heavy, so you want to be able to reach the hive with a wheelbarrow or trolley. You will need a bit of space around the hive to be able to carry out your inspections, and maybe to expand the number of hives. Bees have regular flight paths, so if you don’t want them flying across your main paths, you can force them to fly higher by putting up screens, or planting hedges.
Once your hive is set up you can start to look for your new colony. Often you can buy an entire colony from an established beekeeper who is looking to get rid of a surplus hive. Since a colony is typically 50,000-60,000 bees, this can be quite daunting for a novice. Alternatively, you can buy what is called a nucleus or ‘nuc’. This is a small colony of about 10,000 bees, with a young laying queen and some brood on five frames. A nuc is the easiest way to get started, as the number of bees is small and manageable, giving you time to get used to them before handling larger numbers. The third way is to buy a swarm, but this is really down to luck! Local beekeepers may be called to collect a swarm, and they will give or sell on the colony to somebody wanting to get started. The downside of starting with a swarm is that you know nothing about the bees – such as where they came from, the health status of the colony and their temperament – and yes, you do get bees with a nasty temperament!
There is an alternative to the traditional way to keep bees, and that is natural beekeeping, which makes use of simple hive designs that have been around for thousands of years and are still used in much of the developing world. It is a less intensive way of beekeeping, and the bees are kept mostly for the benefit they bring rather than for a harvest of honey. It’s based on the approach of ‘giving to the bees’, rather than ‘taking from the bees’.
Most natural beekeepers use a top-bar hive, which is easy to make. It is simply a trapezoidal box with bars across the top and an entrance for the bees. Each bar has a groove along its length that is filled with wax to act as a guide, and an anchor point for the bees to build their comb. One of the advantages of a top-bar hive is the ease of managing it. It’s very much a hands-off style of beekeeping, with minimal disturbance.
It is possible to take a small harvest of comb honey from these hives, but the bulk of the honey is left for the bees so they have enough food to last the winter. This avoids the need to feed the bees with a large quantity of sugar solution (tens of kilos) at the end of summer to replace their honey.
The hive on the left is a Warre hive, which looks like a traditional hive but is in fact a natural hive, while the white-and-blue ones are top-bar hives.
The bees benefit too. In the wild, the size of the cell varies to suit the conditions. In a traditional hive, the wax foundation dictates the size of the cell, which tends to be larger than a wild cell, so there is more room for honey. But a larger cell also encourages the varroa mite, a major parasite of bees and responsible for the failure of many colonies. In a top-bar hive the bees determine the size of the cells, and there seems to be a lower incidence of varroa in these hives.
Extraction is simple. First, you remove a bar with its comb, brush off the bees and replace it with a new bar. Drop the comb into a stainless-steel bucket and crush it to release the honey. Strain the honey through muslin into a jar. The leftover wax and honey can be placed back near the hive for the bees to clean, and then you can use the wax for candles.
