If you grow pome fruit, beans, almonds, trimmed hazelnuts or willows, flowering crops of any kind, or just have lots of wildflowers in your garden, you’ll already have bees as visitors, so keeping a hive or two of bees would seem like a great idea. However, while my main interest is bees, my first piece of advice to gardeners considering beekeeping is to first spend some time addressing the needs of other wild pollinators, especially bumblebees and solitary bees.
It may seem romantic to have thousands of bees buzzing around your flower beds, but the reality is that they are not completely free of problems. If your yard is small and urban, you might want to think twice before placing a box of fifty thousand stinger-equipped insects near a neighbor’s territory. There may be pets, children and the elderly to consider. You may want to think about how you use your garden space and how your activities such as sunbathing, eating outdoor or just hanging clothes – can get in the way of your flight path, which can sometimes make Heathrow seem like a haven of peace.
I say these things not to discourage you, but rather to encourage you to think carefully about what your real reasons for wanting to ‘own’ bees may be.
Chances are the flowering plants you grow are already being pollinated quite effectively by wild bees and other insects, and unless you’re growing these crops on a large scale, adding bees to the mix will only have a marginal effect on yields. . Exceptions to this might include areas where neighbors routinely spray insecticides, with the result that wild insect numbers have been drastically reduced, or places where wild bee populations have suffered for other reasons, such as heavy pollution or loss of habitat. Unfortunately, in these cases, you are probably in the wrong place to keep bees.
Compared to most livestock, bees need little attention, and therefore can be added to a garden, farm, or small property without fear of wasting a lot of time. However, as with any other creature in our care, someone has to give them the right kind of care at the right times, if only to make sure they’re comfortable, blindfolded, and disease-free. Bees are, and will continue to be, wild creatures, unimpressed by our attempts to domesticate them, so ‘keeping’ them is really a matter of providing them with suitable housing and allowing them the freedom to roam. Beyond that, especially if you have honey in mind, you need to consider the degree and style of “management” you will strive to apply.
Addressing the needs of other native bees first will help ensure that you don’t cause an imbalance by flooding the area with bees while the local bumblebee population is not optimal. Exactly how this can be assessed has not yet been fully established, but if bumblebees are currently rare visitors to your yard, it may be too early to add a hive.
One of the most important considerations is the availability of food during the bee flight season, and this is where the gardener can apply his particular skills to ensure biodiversity and the appropriate variety of species. There is considerable overlap in the varieties of flowers visited by different types of insect pollinators and each has particular preferences. For example, bumblebees tend to prefer comfrey, red clover, and foxglove, while honey bees are more likely to be found on heather, white clover, and apple blossoms. Of the ‘imported’ species, Buddleja is famously attractive to butterflies, moths and many bee species, and Himalayan balsam provides a welcome late-season boost, especially for bees and hoverflies.
Of course, many if not most putative beekeepers are tempted in that direction by the prospect of having their own honey ‘on tap’. Honey production depends on three main factors: the number of colonies maintained, the quantity and variety of food available, and above all, the climate. Of these, only the first is fully under your control, as bees can drill within a five-kilometre (three-mile) radius of your hive. If most of that territory is flower-rich meadows and hedgerows, organic farmland, or uncultivated wild green fields, you’re probably in a good position to keep at least half a dozen hives if you want to. Increasingly, town and city beekeepers are finding that their bees are healthier and more productive than those kept close to farmland, and the explanation for this seems increasingly clear: our agricultural system is a massive consumer of pesticides, fungicides and herbicides, which are known to be dangerous to pollinators. Much attention has recently been paid to the insidious destructive power of systemic neonicotinoids, including imidacloprid, clothianidin, and thiamethoxam, which are known to be highly toxic to bees under laboratory conditions but have been licensed for use in the countryside. Typically applied as seed coatings, they work their way into the cell structure of plants as they grow and make the entire plant, from its roots to its pollen and nectar, toxic to anything that gets too close. . Concern about its potential for toxicity to humans has also been widely expressed.
If you decide you want to bring bees into your life, a first choice you must make is between ‘conventional’ beekeeping, using variations of the Langstroth-style frame and foundation hive, and so-called ‘natural’ beekeeping. , which is primarily based on variants of the top bar hive. The route you follow will depend on your philosophy, your priorities and your pocket. The conventional approach requires a substantial initial investment in equipment, continued reliance on purchased supplies, and the potential for higher honey yields; while the natural path can be followed at minimal cost, with generally lower but more sustainable yields and a minimal carbon footprint. Before choosing between them, you should first look for opportunities to have some direct, hands-on encounters with live bees. mass.
It should also be noted that not everyone has the right temperament for working with bees, and it’s good to establish this one way or another before you encounter tens of thousands of bees in your backyard.
There are some things that all gardeners can do to help all bees and other pollinators, in addition to taking up beekeeping.
The most important thing anyone can do is learn to control pests using biological methods that do not require the use of toxic chemicals. About 98% of all insects are beneficial to us in some way, but most insecticides don’t discriminate between ‘friends’ and ‘foes’.
The next most important thing you can do is improve bee habitat by planting native wildflowers, the kind that bees evolved over a hundred million years. There are lists of bee-friendly plants available online and there are some plant nurseries that specialize in them.
If you have space in your garden, letting some of it go wild to create a safe haven for bees and other insects is a great idea. Gardens that are too tidy are not as friendly to wildlife. Small piles of twigs and leaves and rock piles are useful for many species.
Aside from the practical reasons you may be considering keeping bees, they are an attractive species that we have a lot to learn about. Beekeeping is a fascinating and absorbing activity that has the potential to enrich your relationship with the landscape and its untamed inhabitants.
And just having more bees of all kinds around can greatly increase the enjoyment of your garden.