What does Beekeeping mean to me and what have I learnt?
I have always been interested in animals, I have had four different breeds of chickens when I was younger, I’ve had various styles of aquariums and very unique tropical fish, and now bees. Animals have always had a very intriguing affect on me, I find they have a very specific structure and how things need to be for them to survive and flourish. Finding and perfecting these different aspects as best you can helps these animals flourish and seeing them at there full potential provides an amazing personal gratification.
When you first start out in any venture finding these aspects out is always the hard part, I call this stage the learning stage, for bees it’s understanding how warmth plays such a critical role in a hives survivability and longevity. I try to explain it like living in a wet damp home and it just makes it really uncomfortable and chances of becoming sick are higher when the home is cold and damp, compared to a warm and snug home everyone is much happier and more vibrant. So making sure we as beekeepers are able to keep our hives in snug warm environment is our first priority in keeping our hives strong and healthy, this way we can easily get them to their maximum potential come Summer time.
Learning where to put hives and understanding how bees interact with the Flora and Fauna within New Zealand is critical, so understanding which trees, shrubs, and grasses are cohesive with providing pollen and nectar to help sustain your bees. I like to call this the bees diet. Having a diet that has various different sources is great compared to having one or two sources can be detrimental for your bees. I explain it like this it’s like having a meal and only having meat for breakfast, lunch and dinner, you aren’t getting the various range of nutrients from a healthy diet. This is why having bees pollinate kiwifruit orchards is actually not helpful to the bees, as kiwifruit pollen has very little nutrients, as bees bring in the pollen the bees feed the pollen to the new emerging larvae, so if the larvae have food with little nutrients the next generation of bees longevity will be hindered. This is why beekeepers only pollinate kiwifruit orchards for 2 weeks and then move there hives out to find a more varied food source.
Moving bees has been one of the hardest and back breaking things I have had to learn over my 4 years of beekeeping. Just picking up a hive in the middle of the day and moving it just doesn’t work, half the hive is out gathering nectar and pollen and when they come home and their hive is no longer there the bees simply pile up in a big clump where their hive once was. So, moving hives needs to be done early in the morning or at night when all the bees are nestled up in their hive. When moving a hive, we had to learn quickly that you need to block the entrance so bees don’t come out when you are travelling so you don’t loose half your bees on the motorway. Bees get very upset when you move them so getting stung multiple times on any exposed skin (typically ankles) is soon a reality I had to come to terms with. When bees are being transported and are locked up being in a contained box the bee’s flap and move around creating a large surge in heat, so making sure you keep the hives cool is critical because cooking hives is really a very unpleasant thing to have to learn.
I have many more things I have learned but overall the main things I have learned from becoming a beekeeper is appreciate the environment more, look at flowers, look at and learn the different trees around you, understanding how a hive complements and helps the biodiversity in an ecosystem. All these things have helped me understand that if I don’t understand or experience something I should learn about it so I can further understand, not just in beekeeping but in any thing I do, this helps me have an open mind about things.
By Thomas Clow
