Waxing lyrical about the joys of beekeeping

“We have chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax: thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things which are sweetness and light.” Jonathan Swift (1667-1747)

In the summer my home is filled with the most glorious, floral aroma as I endeavour to keep up with the busy bees and extract fragrantly-delicious fresh honey straight from the beehive. The thick white honey combs, which can weigh up 1.5 kilos each, are carefully uncapped to remove the protective layer of wax releasing the golden honey stored inside each hexagonal cell.

Under the heat of June’s blazing sun, the bees have gathered nectar from a smorgasbord of flowers, wild and cultivated. From the golden fields of oil seed rape to blushing horse chestnut trees and the dazzling white flowers of hawthorn in the hedgerows, the bees have been selecting the most bountiful and sugary rewards they can find.

The numbers add up

The distance each honey bee flies in its life is astonishing. Foraging bees gather nectar from plants within less than a mile of their hive but will go as far as five miles if there is nothing nearer. A strong colony made up of around 60,000 bees can fly the equivalent distance from the earth to the moon every day.

Directed by their sisters through the waggle dance, a highly sophisticated method of communication which relays information about quality, identity, direction and distance, they are able to find and exploit the source.

Using the position of the sun to navigate they can calculate the most economical route from A to B. And if the weather’s cloudy, they use polarised light to see through even thick cloud.
Bees don’t hang around. The top speed of a forager is around 15-20mph when flying to flowers and drops to 12mph when returning and heavily laden with nectar and pollen.

But back to my extracting room and those towers of honey supers, or boxes. As the glistening and super sticky honey drains from the extractor through a sieve catching flakes of wax, a series of honey numbers come to mind. It takes two million flowers to make a 450g pot of honey with each bee contributing about one-twelfth of a teaspoon in her lifetime. I try not to waste a single drop!

Good honey is a quintessentially local food - it's a snapshot of time and place. Put a dab on your tongue and be transported to long summer days filled with sunshine and bees gently buzzing amongst the flowers. For the unique taste of your neighbourhood, or holiday location, get a pot of honey from a local beekeeper.

In addition to the sticky stuff, the honey combs yield the sweetest and cleanest beeswax which I use to make candles. A golden beeswax candle floods a room with the sweet aroma of a bee hive and the gentle glow of natural beeswax. Beeswax is one of nature's treasures: prized since antiquity, fragrant beeswax candles burn longer and cleaner than other wax candles.

Interested in becoming a beekeeper?

But all this bounty felt unobtainable when I attended an introductory talk about beekeeping in a nearby church hall. Experienced beekeepers revealed a world which had been largely unnoticed by me until then. But they whetted my appetite and I wanted to know more about the insect which, along with wild pollinators, is responsible for one in three mouthfuls of food. Without bees the world would be a very dull place. Imagine, no raspberries and strawberries in the summer! Not to mention orchard fruit and vegetables from peas and bees to squashes.

I soon joined a local beekeeping association and my magical journey of discovery began in earnest. The beginners course started with theory in winter and ran through to summer when we were finally able to prise open a hive roof and see the bees first hand. The queen bee is larger than all the others and is attended by a retinue of attendants laying eggs where directed. The industrious worker bees graduate from nursing duties to honey and pollen processing and a variety of roles until they finally become foragers before dying of exhaustion or accident at the tender age of just six weeks. Winter bees have a much better deal and can live for six months.

That was 18 years ago and I’m still as enamoured with bees and beekeeping as I was on that very first day. There is something wonderous and new to see at every turn; sometimes observing bees at the front of the hive busy about their work and at others trying to discover what is going on inside.

If you’re interested in becoming a beekeeper, I urge you to attend a beginners’ course. By learning the basics and handling bees you can decide if it’s for you. There are lots of factors to take into consideration not least:

• Cost – a basic kit with a flat-packed hive, bee suit and essential tools costs about £500 without any bees. But one hive is never enough and, if you’re lucky enough to get a honey harvest, more equipment is needed.
• Time commitment – beekeeping is particularly demanding from spring through the summer when colonies need to be inspected weekly.
• Apiary site – the principal consideration is to place bees where they don’t cause a nuisance to neighbours and passersby and the bees have plenty of forage and water.
• Stings – it’s an occupational hazard but doesn’t suit those who react badly.
• Craft skills – these include woodworking skills to make making frames for beehives to extracting honey and cleaning wax.
• Strength – inspecting hives and removing the honey is physically demanding. A full honey super can weigh 15 kilos.

Beekeeping isn’t for everyone. But bees of all descriptions can be helped with suitable planting; choose plants with single, open flowers for easy access to the pollen and nectar.

For more information, visit the website of the British Beekeepers’ Association. 

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