No honey, no money

Lifting the lid on our new hive, Jess is suited and booted for the job, the smoke calming the bees

As well as our re-wilding work at Cefn Garthenor, I’ve been keen to use a small part of the land for related but more commercial purposes.  We started the nursery project last year, which is going very well.  Jess, our excellent horticultural lead, has been collecting and propagating seeds and cuttings collected on site so that we will be able to sell native trees to local buyers and projects in years to come.  We also have an orchard underway with lots of old Welsh varieties of apple (desert, cooking and cider making), and are starting to get wildflower plugs underway. 

With so many wildflowers on site, and apple blossom to come, it seemed that there was one obvious product we could also supply … honey.  With this in mind, Jess enlisted with the Lampeter and District Beekeepers Association (https://lampeterbeekeepers.co.uk/) and joined their beekeeping course in February.

Just four months later, one of the members of the association had a swarm of bees which needed re-homing and Jess stepped forward, suitably booted and suited for the job.  Bees swarm when their current home becomes overcrowded.  A new queen is crowned and the hive divides, with half leaving.  In this case the bees settled in a new temporary hive and were transported to Cefn Garthenor where they are now living. 

A hive could end up housing 35 – 40,000 bees at the height of summer, dying back to around 5,000 over the winter.  There will be just one queen, a few hundred male drones and thousands of female workers. 

The male drones have just one job … they need to mate with the queen.  Everyday they rise to a congregation area and wait for a virgin queen bee to make her maiden flight.  So far, so night club.  The ending is, however, not so good for the successful drones.  In the act of mating, their sexual organs detach and, as if that’s not bad enough, they promptly die.  Success never sounded less successful, but if they are unsuccessful in the mating game, they are kicked out of the hive at the end of the summer and die anyway.  Hey ho.  The young queen may mate 12 to 15 times in her visits to the congregation area in the first few weeks of her life, and she will save the sperm and use it to fertilise eggs throughout her life.  That’s quite a sperm bank, given she may live 2 or 3 years and lays up to 2,000 eggs a day in peak season, perhaps a million eggs in her lifetime.

The female workers are out harvesting pollen … a hive may collect 20kg a year, that’s a million 20mg round trips.  The work is hard and they only live a few weeks in the summer (longer in the winter), which is why the queen must lay so many eggs.  They create a comb on the “frames” we put in the hive, with cells which can either hold bee babies, pollen or honey.  The queen is busy laying eggs, which, when hatched, are fed by the workers.  Those workers can also decide, if they feel the hive is too full or that the queen is past her best, that they need a new queen.  They then create one, feeding one or more larvae up with “royal jelly”, in a modified worker cell, within the comb.  The existing queen may kill these new rivals with a sting which, unlike that of regular worker bees, does not kill her.  However, when the workers think the queen has past her sell by date, they’ll turn on her.  It’s a brutal business, but the survival of the colony depends on it.  Think game of thrones.

Back to the living arrangements within the hive.  At the bottom is the brood box, where the queen has full access and can lay eggs.  It comprises a series of vertical frames which can be lifted out for inspection.  Above this sits a queen excluder (so she, being the biggest, can’t get through, although regular workers can), and on top of that, a “super” (short for superstructure) with more frames.  As the queen can’t access this “super” area, no eggs are laid there.  So, the bees use it for spare honey, which we can harvest.  That’s a very simplified, but hopefully accurate, description of what goes on!  For more information, www.bbka.org.uk .

We want Cefn Garthenor to be productive and also to be able to employ people in the area.  I’m very keen that re-wilding is seen as beneficial to the local community and economy as well as to nature.  By starting up these small enterprises we can justify employing both Jess and John, our part time agricultural hand, who not only make these commercial projects happen but help massively with the main rewilding project.  Twisting the words a little, no honey, no money … and this honey will help to fund the land’s return to nature.