Annual Bee keeper Appreciation Day
Posted 06-15-2011 at 12:06 PM by STM
Personally I prefer apiarist because who knows whether bee keeper is all one word or not? Certainly not the google chrome spell check.
Hopefully this will be one of my finer crafted blogs. So, recently I have been talking increasingly about bee keeping, not to sure why, I think it stemmed from the pets thread, but coincidentally it appears to be 'Annual Bee keeper Appreciation Day', (if MoxCo made this up recently then I'll look rather foolish,) so I thought I would give a little information on my life as an avid apiarist and bees in general.
A good bee keeper will - weather providing - go and visit his apiary (collection of hives) roughly twice a week, this is not a solid figure and varies from person to person and country to country. I for one do not follow the trend, rather I take a l'aissez faire approach to looking after my little honey makers and visit maybe three or four times a month. A check roughly takes five to ten minutes per hive and in this time a trained eye will look at honey production, amount stored, whether it should be harvested, the number of bees in the colony, signs of disease and parasitic varroa destructor, whether the queen is laying and drone brood numbers, (how many lazy males are lounging in the hive). Armed only with my trusty smoker, a box of matches and a 'hive tool' (miniature crow bar) I tread up past the remains of the orchard and up to the hive boxes, clad in a thin polyester bee suit and a 360 degree mesh head cover and make hasty preparation before setting to work.
But should I be worried with the alarming statistics plaguing the news more and more? That the bees are dying, the Asian hornet's invasion from France to England imminent and CCD/ Varroa taking their respective tolls on the population, not even forgetting the amount of bees lost due to these ever harsher winters.
Well surprisingly the conservation status of the honey bee (the broad genus not species) is 'Least Concern,' however, I imagine individual species such as the 'British Bee' suffers far more than wikipedia lets on. Let's look at statistics:
N. Ireland reports a 50% decrease in honey bees due to CCD
Some American keepers can expect to lose 1/3 of their colonies year by year when it is these corporate apiarists that provide much of the pollination of our food stuffs.
Without the honey bee, we would need to provide a work force millions strong in America alone to hand pollinate the blooming crops such as apples, oranges, pears and most other fruits. There is even a legend that Einstein predicted with the global demise of the honey bee, humanity could sustain itself for no longer than three years.
Perhaps then, with bees playing such an important part in our lives we could show them common courtesy rather than the fly swatter. In fact, the pollination market is worth billions of GBP world wide. Funny to think that when one bee collects something under a gram of pollen in its life time.
And on a lesser note, I will have been on this site for three years in a couple of days, I hope by now most of you see me as one of the good guys, I certainly think of each of you as at the very least someone I can count upon to be nice and in general good people to be around.
