Wednesday 3rd February 2010
Beekeeping by Molly Bonard
Today we were delighted to have as our speaker Molly Bonard ( left) who has at least ten years experiences as an amateur bee keeper and is currently Hon. Chairman of the Epsom Division of Surrey Beekeeping Association. She explained for those unfamiliar with beekeeping that Ewell Village has it's own apiary located behind Upper Mill, off the Kingston Road. Then with the aid of some hand held diagrams covered the basics of bees and their type from the queen, workers, drones etc. Needless to say with a dry sense of humour pointed out the characteristics of male and females of bees where the male is merely a drone only fit for mating, to an all male audience, we took her point with aplomb!!
Globally, there are thousands of species of wild bees, including many which are solitary or which rear their young in burrows and small colonies and perhaps in your roof spaces, like mason bees and bumblebees, Molly pointed out there are at least 27 types of bumble bees in the UK and showed specimens of actual bees, luckily all dead! she continued beekeeping, or apiculture which is technically correct, is concerned with the practical management of the social species of honey bees, which live in large colonies of up to 100,000 individuals, rather than the wild bumblebees which have much smaller groups.
There are considerable regional variations in the type of hive in which bees are kept. A hive (developed by Langstroth more below) is a set of rectangular wooden boxes filled with moveable wood or plastic frames, each of which holds a sheet of wax foundation. Although in the many products Molly brought there was a rope basket as she said similar to the original hives, but she used this for gathering swarms that had left the original hives. The bees build cells upon the sheets of foundation to create complete honeycombs. Foundation comes in two cell-sizes: worker foundation, which enables the bees to create small, hexagonal worker cells; and drone foundation, which allows the bees to build much larger drone cells, for the production of these male bees.
The bottom box, or brood chamber, contains the queen and most of the bees; the upper boxes, or supers, contain just honey. Only the young nurse bees can produce wax flakes which they secrete from between their abdominal plates; they build honeycomb using the artificial wax foundation as a starting point, after which they may raise brood or deposit honey and pollen in the cells of the comb. Molly indicated a queen bee could live for up to five years and produce 2,000 eggs per day over each season from the single mating, quite a production process, but her most productive years being the first two.
Collecting honey from wild bee colonies is one of the most ancient human activities and is still practiced by aboriginal societies in parts of Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. Some of the earliest evidence of gathering honey from wild colonies is from rock painting, dating to around 13,000 BC. Gathering honey from wild bee colonies is usually done by subduing the bees with smoke and breaking open the tree or rocks where the colony is located, often resulting in the physical destruction of the colony.
At some point humans began to domesticate wild bees in artificial hives made from hollow logs, wooden boxes, pottery vessels, and woven straw baskets or "skeps." The domestication of bees was well developed in Egypt and sealed pots of honey were found in the graves of Pharaohs such as Tutankhamen.
Molly continued early forms of honey collecting entailed the destruction of the entire colony when the honey was harvested. The wild hive was crudely broken into, using smoke to suppress the bees; the honeycombs were torn out and smashed up — along with the eggs, larvae and honey they contained. The liquid honey from the destroyed brood nest was crudely strained through a sieve or basket. This was destructive and unhygienic, but for hunter-gatherer societies this did not matter, since the honey was generally consumed immediately and there were always more wild colonies to exploit. However, in settled societies, the destruction of the bee colony meant the loss of a valuable resource; this drawback persisted until the 19th Century, which made beekeeping both inefficient and something of a "stop and start" activity. There could be no continuity of production and no possibility of selective breeding, since each bee colony was destroyed at harvest time, along with its precious queen. During the medieval period abbeys and monasteries were centres of beekeeping, since beeswax was highly prized for candles and fermented honey was used to make alcoholic mead, Molly had more specimens of honey by-products to show us.
She mentioned the change in beekeeping practice through the invention and perfection of the movable comb hive by Langstroth, he was the first person to make practical use of the gap between the wax combs, which bees would not block with wax, but kept as a free passage. Having determined this gap, he then designed a series of wooden frames within a rectangular hive box, carefully maintaining the correct space between successive frames, and found that the bees would build parallel honeycombs in the box without bonding them to each other or to the hive walls. This enables the beekeeper to slide any frame out of the hive for inspection, without harming the bees or the comb, protecting the eggs, larvae and pupae contained within the cells. It also meant that combs containing honey could be gently removed and the honey extracted without destroying the comb. The emptied honey combs (below) could then be returned to the bees intact for refilling.
The differences in hive dimensions are insignificant in comparison to the common factors in all these hives: they are all square or rectangular; they all use moveable wooden frames; they all consist of a floor, brood-box, honey-super, crown-board and roof. Hives have traditionally been constructed of cedar, pine, or cypress wood, but in recent years hives made from injection moulded plastic, Molly showed us pictures of her and her husbands hives in Ewell and pointed out that they tended to be very heavy as a hive could produce on average 60 kilos of honey and hence her husbands stack was higher than hers.
Hives also use queen excluders between the brood-box and honey supers to keep the queen from laying eggs in cells next to those containing honey intended for consumption. Also, with the advent in the 20th century of mite pests, hive floors are often replaced with a wire mesh and removable tray to eliminate these pests..
This was a most entertaining and informative talk and Doug Clarke after a series of questions gave a well presented vote of thanks supplemented from his childhood experiences of watching beekeepers at work, thanked Molly for carefully explaining all the technical procedures he never understood as a child, today all was revealed not only to Doug but too most of the membership, thank you Molly our next taste of honey will flood our memories with you presentation.
