I'm really appreciating the breadth of Jake's experience, his contagious enthusiasm and his openness to different ways of doing things. Here in New Zealand, virtually all hives are of the Langstroth design, set up to suit beekeepers ... bees not so much.
I was introduced to beekeeping in 2011 by the late Marcia Meehan. From this wonderful woman I learned how to manage a horizontal top bar hive, which looks very different to a Langstroth hive. It also calls for a radically different approach to working with bees, which some people call stewardship or bee guardianship, rather than beekeeping.
There's at least half a dozen people in the UCOL course interested in working with top bar hives or their vertical cousins, the Warre hive. Both are completely legal - they meet the requirement of having frames that can be individually removed for disease inspection.
Bees today are facing grave pressures from disease (American foul brood), pests (the varroa mite), pesticides (including those commonly sprayed in urban gardens) and starvation and poor nutrition.
Let's remember: bees are not domesticated and they work themselves to death (literally) through summer to store honey to keep their colony alive over winter and early spring. It's common practice to take most or even all those honey stores and substitute it with a heavy sugar syrup.
In the United States, it's even worse - the bees are fed high fructose corn syrup. Neither of these are equivalent to honey, which is alkaline, has a different chemical structure and is full of micro-nutrients. There's a difference between calories that keep you alive and food that nourishes you.
How can anyone can be surprised that so many bee colonies are dying given the multiplicity of pressures?
It's great our council dropped the ban on urban beekeeping. It was widely disregarded anyway, but it was an unnecessary restriction. Urban bees are largely better off than their rural counterparts and I believe the spread of urban hives tended by knowledgeable beekeepers is very important to supporting healthy bee populations.
We have many beautiful gardens in Whanganui, both public and private, plus urban orchards and vege gardens - all these need pollination too.
There's a lot you can do to help. Spray less Roundup and pesticides; ideally lay off them altogether. At least, don't spray plants while they are flowering and spray at the end of the day when bees are done.
How about making room at your place for food sources for bees and other pollinators? Wildflowers and other simple flowers are ideal; elaborate double blooms less so, because the flowers are too intricate for bees to access the nectar or pollen. Plant drifts of one type of flower rather than dotting flowers here and there. Even simply oversowing a quiet patch of lawn with clover and not mowing while it's flowering will be a great help. (Just make sure it's not an area where children regularly play barefoot.)
What with this mild winter and early spring - hasn't the weather this past week been sublime? - bees are already building up their numbers and venturing out to forage. It's a delight to watch them at work.
- Rachel Rose is a writer, fermenter and gardener.
