From A to Bee(8)

Suffice to say Jo and I took Sebastian, our very little but ever-so-chubby one, on a pub crawl road trip. Essentially we went out on the proviso of visiting a couple of pubs in the local area for a few drinks and a spot of lunch. It has been quite a while since Jo and I have ventured out because Sebastian is still young, so this was deemed a real treat. Well, it was until I requested that we drive the 'long way round' so that I could look out of the window at the fields. I feel it's important to understand what my bees will be foraging on locally. It had never really dawned on me before that different flowers or crops would produce different honey and also require different methods of managing a hive. Without knowing what was growing locally, it would make the job that little bit harder.



Imagine realising that your husband wants to visit the pub as a cover for driving around looking at fields for an hour or two. There I was, notebook in hand, nose literally stuck to the window as Jo drove around, Sebastian asleep in the back, writing notes on all the fields I saw. How very sad. A trainspotter is one thing but a field-spotter is quite another.



The worst bit was, and I should have realised this before we set out, we are in the depths of winter. What hope had I got of knowing what was planted? It was immediately obvious that yes, there were lots of fields, but most of them contained 6 inch-high stubs of previously harvested crops. It was either that or freshly dug-over soil for mile upon mile.



So I learned a lot today but more about the local landscape, and a few pubs, than I did about what my bees might be flying to. I will say that the afternoon got a lot more fun after the third pub, having my third variation of local ale – especially as it was a Christmas beer called 'Santa's Wobble'. As the name suggests I was wobbling slightly as I left.



Still, it's certainly a job worth doing, though the mission wasn't really accomplished; maybe I will just have to do it all again in the spring. I might have to work harder at convincing Jo next time, though.



Strange as it seems, in a couple of days it's the penultimate session of my training course. I still haven't seen any bees and yet I feel I am becoming strangely attached to these little black and yellow insects that for years I have been afraid of and tried to run away from. The fear seems to be abating the more I understand them and the important role they play in all of our lives but I realise it will still be a minimum of four months until I actually get to see my own bees and get my own hive. It seems a long way off.





NOVEMBER 17



Today's penultimate session dealt with the 'products of the hive'. Here I was thinking that meant basically 'honey'.



I had already learned that worker bees have little wax glands on their back. The generated shards of wax are then moulded and manipulated to build the wax cells to deposit the honey in or for the queen to lay her eggs in. I know this sounds funny but I hadn't put two and two together and realised this wax can then be melted down and made into beeswax candles – I'd never really linked up the name before now.



There are also some beekeepers who specifically harvest pollen and attach so-called pollen traps to the outside of their hives – rather ugly-looking, brightly coloured boxes which knock off pollen from the backs of the bees' legs as they fly into the hive. I have images of little boxing gloves attached to springs which come out and punch the legs of bees as they walk through the trap. Apparently some beekeepers sell local pollen for people to eat. 'A teaspoon a day keeps the hay fever away', to take a popular phrase and change it around a little bit.



Then you have royal jelly, which really sounds special. Apparently royal jelly is fed to eggs and larvae to provide a rich diet of pollen and nectar; eggs selected as workers are fed it for a few days before switching to another foodstuff, whereas eggs selected to generate a potential new queen are fed royal jelly exclusively. Now I had heard about royal jelly before in hair shampoo but didn't have a clue that it is essentially bee food. I certainly didn't realise that it had great medicinal qualities. It is used to control Graves' disease and stimulate stem cell growth, not to mention its cholesterol-lowering and antibiotic properties. I believe, having heard all of this, humans should bathe in royal jelly every day for an hour or at least use it as an alternative to ketchup, and we would all be much healthier. I know there are some beauty salons that already use bee venom in some procedures to make people look more beautiful so I wonder how long it will be till health farms start to offer these royal jelly baths. What a great present for your wife – a bath filled with bee food!



There are plenty of other products that can be harvested from the hive – propolis, or bee glue, is another one that beekeepers can sell on for ridiculous sums of money in some countries – who knows why? Perhaps it's simply due to its scarcity and difficulty of extraction. Until today I had just considered honey as the sole product of a beehive and was simply thinking of a beehive as something that looked nice at the bottom of the garden. I have never before considered the huge variety of substances that bees produce and the ways and means of extracting them.