A primer on the necessity and beauty of beekeeping
So the next time you see a bee, be nice to these gentle creatures that work so hard for the betterment of nature.
Oh, boy, when I read Kathryn Greenaway’s “Urban beekeeping comes to the suburbs” — about Pointe-Claire and Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue installing beehives on the roofs of their public libraries — I had a Sheldon Cooper moment.
The character from TV’s The Big Bang Theory erupts into technical knowledge when a topic that tickles him pops up. I asked a good pal, George Skoba, who owns a bee farm, to share his expertise on these fuzzy, buzzy friends of ours.
Skoba, a former car mechanic, says he much prefers beekeeping to being a mechanic: “Can you lick your fingers working as a mechanic?”
“Throughout winter, bees don’t sleep,” he said. “They keep warm by clustering. That is the only time when they relax. They are very clean and never go to the washroom inside the hive.
The colony can die from contamination, so they have to hold it for a very long time.
Bees will emerge in the winter provided the day suddenly warms to between 10 and 15 C.
“Raising bees is a very delicate challenge,” he said. “They are wild, and simply allow us to keep them. They can leave anytime they want. We have to adjust to them, not them to us.”
Skoba listed some factors that can cause a decline in the bee population.
Reduced sources of food (nectar): “Years ago, canola was a great source. Today, the plant is genetically modified so it does not seed and therefore does not need to make nectar, whose sole purpose is to attract pollinators.” Pesticides: “Nicotine-based, they are not poison to us, but gradually destroy the immune systems of insects. For bees, it is a slow death. In particular, if the soil and water table is contaminated, bees are affected because they need water to build their hives. Purple loosestrife (a common invasive species) used to provide good nectar. Now it is being removed by beekeepers because it pulls up toxic water and chemicals in wet areas.”
Mites: “I lost 110 hives last winter because of parasites.”
Drought: “In 2016, I had fewer honeycombs.”
The beauty of beekeeping is that you don’t have to rush, he said. “You can take a moment to marvel at how they operate as a community. The hive is docile when you don’t bother them. A bee may sit on my finger cleaning its antenna for 15 minutes.”
“Honey production is only 10 per cent of the bees’ work. More importantly, 90 per cent is pollination. Honey is not only food, it is a health product that boosts your immune system (only if it is unpasteurized, kept in its natural state) Bee pollen is like a multivitamin. And to the resins collected from trees, bees add honey and wax to make propolis, an antibacterial agent used to line each cell inside the hive to ensure larvae health. We scrape off the excess, dilute it and bottle it as a natural antibiotic and proven antiseptic that helps heal wounds and skin infections.
“Each cell is a perfect hexagon, the most efficient use of space. The beeswax we use in candlemaking is a clean concentration of sun energy. The bees fill each cell with nectar at 50 per cent moisture and fan it with their wings until it evaporates to 18 per cent. Then they cap it with wax. The cells are angled to keep the honey from flowing out.”
George said that unlike bees, wasps and hornets are predators that have retractable stingers. Their venom is meant to kill or paralyze their prey.
In contrast, bees are herbivores. Their stingers are harpoon-like and connected to their intestines. Their venom, called epitoxin, is used as a blood thinner for people with arthritis, and is able to relieve pain while reducing swelling in joints.
“It has a chemical found only in its venom, so some people say that bees were given to us by the gods from another planet,” he said.
“There is zero waste in bee production,” he said. Dead bees are used in the production of natural remedies.
“Yet another bee product is royal jelly, concentrated vitamins that are fed exclusively to queens,” he said. “If a queen dies or is no longer productive, the colony will take an egg and raise it as a queen. It is not the queen that is in charge in a hive, but the collective mind of the bees, deciding what is best for the colony. It takes 10,000 bee lives to make one teaspoon of honey because a bee lives only about 40 days.”
Cool, huh? So the next time you see a bee, be nice to these gentle creatures that work so hard for the betterment of nature. We could sure learn a lot from them on that score.