kinds of honey, its culinary attraction, and how to produce, harvest, and market your honey.
But the sweet reward is by no means the only reason folks are attracted to beekeeping. Since the 18th century, agriculture has recognized the value of pollination by bees. Without the bees’ help, many commercial crops would suffer serious consequences. More on that later. Even backyard beekeepers witness dramatic improvements in their garden: more and larger fruits, flowers, and vegetables. A hive or two in the garden makes a big difference in your success as a gardener.
The rewards of beekeeping extend beyond honey and pollination. Bees also produce other products that can be harvested and put to good use, including beeswax, propolis, and royal jelly. Even the pollen they bring back to the hive can be harvested (it’s rich in protein and makes a healthy food supplement in our own diets). Chapter 18 includes a number of fun and practical things you can do with beeswax and propolis.
Harvesting liquid gold: Honey
The prospect of harvesting honey is certainly a strong attraction for new beekeepers. There’s something magical about bottling your own honey. And I can assure you that no other honey tastes as good as the honey made by your own bees. Delicious! Learn all about honey varieties, tasting, and pairing with food in Chapter 15. And be sure to have a look at Chapter 20, where I list ten of my favorite recipes for cooking with honey.
How much honey can you expect? The answer to that question varies depending on factors such as temperature, rainfall, location, and strength of your colony. But producing 40 to 70 pounds or more of surplus honey isn’t unusual for a single strong colony. Chapters 15 through 17 provide plenty of useful information on the kinds of honey you can harvest from your bees and how to go about it. Also included are some suggestions on how you can go about selling your honey — how this hobby can boast a profitable return on investment!
Bees as pollinators: Their vital role to our food supply
The survival of flowering plants depends upon pollination. Any gardener recognizes the value of pollinating insects, birds, bats, and even the wind. This is an essential service in the production of seed and fruit. You may not have thought much about the role honey bees play in our everyday food supply. It is estimated that in North America around 30 percent of the food we consume is produced from bee-pollinated plants. Bees also pollinate crops, such as clover and alfalfa that cattle feed on, making bees important to our production and consumption of meat and dairy. The value of pollination by bees is estimated at around $20 billion in the United States alone.
These are more than interesting facts; these are realities with devastating consequences if bees were to disappear. And sadly, the health of honey bees has been compromised in recent years (see the later section “Being part of the bigger picture: Save the bees!”). Indeed a spring without bees could endanger our food supply and impact our economy. It’s a story that has become headline news in the media.
HONEYBEE OR HONEY BEE?
This is a “tomato/tomahto” issue. The British adhere to their use of the one word: “honeybee.” The Entomological Society of America, however, prefers to use two words “honey bee.” So that’s the version I use in this book. Here’s the society’s rationale: The honey bee is a true bee, like a house fly is a true fly, and thus should be two words. A dragonfly, on the other hand, is not a fly; hence, it is one word. Tip: Spell it both ways when web surfing. That way, you’ll cover all bases and hit all the sites!
WHY BEES MAKE GREAT POLLINATORS
About 100 crops in the United States depend on bees for pollination. Why is the honey bee such an effective pollinator? Because she’s uniquely adapted to the task. Here are several examples of bee adapations:
The honey bee’s anatomy is well suited for carrying pollen. Her body and legs are covered with branched hairs that catch and hold pollen grains. The bee’s hind legs contain pollen baskets that the bee uses for transporting pollen, a major source of food, back to the hive. If the bee brushes against the stigma (female part) of the next flower she visits, some of the pollen grains brush off, and the act of cross-pollination is accomplished.
Most other insects are dormant all winter. They initialy emerge in spring only in small numbers until increasing generations have rebuilt the population of the species. Not the honey bee. Its hive is perennial. The honey bee overwinters with large numbers of bees surviving on stored honey and pollen. Early in the spring, the queen begins laying eggs, and the already large population explodes. When flowers begin to bloom, each hive has tens of thousands of bees to carry out pollination activities. By midsummer, an individual hive contains upward of 60,000 bees.
The honey bee has a unique habit that’s of great value as a pollinator. It tends to forage on blooms of the same kind, as long as they’re flowering. In other words, rather than traveling from one flower type to another, honey bees are flower constant. This focus makes for particularly effective pollination. It also means that the honey they produce from the nectar of a specific flower takes on the unique flavor characteristics of that flower — that’s how we get specific honey flavors, such as orange blossom honey, buckwheat honey, blueberry honey, lavender honey, and so on (see Chapter 15 for a lesson in how to taste and evaluate honey varieties).
The honey bee is one of the only pollinating insects that can be introduced to a garden at the gardener’s will. You can garden on a hit-or-miss basis and hope that enough wild bees are out there to achieve adequate pollination — or you can take positive steps and nestle a colony of honey bees in a corner of your garden. Some commercial beekeepers make their living by renting colonies of honey bees to farmers who depend on bee pollination to raise more bountiful harvests. Known as migratory beekeepers, they haul hundreds of hives across the country, following the various agricultural blooms — to California for almond pollination in February, to the apple orchards in Washington in April, to Maine in May for blueberry pollination, and so on.
I’ve witnessed the miracle in my own garden: more and larger flowers, fruits, and vegetables — all the result of more efficient pollination by bees. After seeing my results, a friend who tends an imposing vegetable garden begged me to place a couple of hives on her property. I did, and she too is thrilled. She rewards me with a never-ending bounty of fruits and vegetables. And I pay my land-rent by providing her with 20 pounds of honey every year. Not a bad barter all around.
Being part of the bigger picture: Save the bees!
Keeping a hive in the backyard dramatically improves pollination and rewards you with a delicious honey harvest by themselves good enough reasons to keep bees. But today, the value of keeping bees goes beyond the obvious. In many areas, millions of colonies of wild (or feral) honey bees have been wiped out by urbanization, pesticides, parasitic mites, and a recent phenomenon called colony collapse disorder (otherwise known as CCD; see Chapter 11 for more information). Collectively, these challenges are devastating the honey bee population.
Many
