The family firm that is giving bees a chance
On toast, crumpets and yoghurt, we love honey.
As a nation, we consume about 30,000t of the sticky golden stuff every year. But we produce only just over 4,000t of that on our own shores.
Bee farming and honey production is a complicated and skilled job, and the average age of the people that do it has steadily increased over the years. It now stands at 66 and there are very few people getting into the industry.
That’s why the Bee Farmers Association (BFA) and Rowse Honey set up a unique apprenticeship scheme to teach 16- to 24-year-olds the necessary skills for a career in this sector.
Rebeckah Marshall, 26, was the first to enrol on the scheme in 2014. “If more young people don’t come in to bee farming, we won’t have British honey,” she says.
“We are already importing thousands of tonnes because we can’t satisfy the demand from supermarkets.”
See also: Interim bee trial results to aid EU neonicotinoid decision
While it has not made getting stung any less painful, three years of experience working full-time for her father’s bee farming business, British Honey Producers, has given Rebeckah a good grounding in all areas of commercial bee farming: honey production, queen rearing and pollination.
And she has now decided to pursue it as a career, after trying more corporate roles but not getting the same job satisfaction.
First, the delicious side of the business. Rebeckah and her father, Ged, have 300 honey production hives – 15 at home in Steeple Claydon, Buckinghamshire, and the rest on other farms across the south of England.
Many are in Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire and Essex on oilseed rape crops, field beans, wildflowers and borage. And some are based on a fruit farm in Kent, pollinating apple, pear and plum trees.
Food store
Bees make honey in the summer to create a food store for the winter months when there is little nectar available because the plants are not flowering.
When beekeepers extract the honey from the hive, they either leave enough to get them through the winter months or feed them a replacement.
The way bees make honey is incredibly clever and precise. They build their honeycombs on a slant, so that when they fill each hexagonal cell with nectar it doesn’t run out – nectar is very watery when the bees put it into the hive, but they get it down to 18% moisture and make it into the sticky stuff we love by flapping their wings to take the moisture out of it. Once it reaches the desired consistency, they seal that section over with wax and move on.
It’s the plant that the nectar comes from that will determine the end-product. Honey from oilseed rape-pollinating bees will be thick and pale in colour, whereas the really golden runny honey comes from crops such as field beans, wild flowers and borage.
Rebeckah and Ged make and sell both types, about 10t in total, supplying Rowse Honey and other honey traders and jarring two tonnes every year to be sold in local outlets.
Rebeckah consumes about 70g of honey herself each week, using it as her only sweetener since she gave up refined sugar earlier this year. She thinks that honey would be a rather expensive habit if she didn’t have it on tap.
In every hive, there will be between 50,000 and 80,000 bees during summer. Each hive will be home to male drones, female workers and just one all-important queen. She is the only bee capable of laying eggs to maintain the population; she also releases pheremones to control the hive’s activity. So no queen, no honey.
Re-queening
Every one to two years a beehive has to be “re-queened” as older queen bees begin to run out of the sperm they have stored from mating with drones and so produce unfertilised eggs – which become drones, not female workers. This means that the hive is less productive.
Re-queening keeps Rebeckah very busy from May until September, the queen-rearing season. She estimates that she will have produced and sent out 1,700 queens this year, making the family firm the biggest queen bee producer in the country.
Myth busting
Do bees really die after they have stung you?
Not necessarily, according to Rebeckah Marshall.
A bee dies when its sting becomes detached from its body. Usually, when a bee stings someone, the person brushes the bee off, detaching it from its sting, which is still in the skin (the sting is barbed).
If you could resist flicking the bee away, it would wriggle round and round and pull its sting out of the skin, and then live on to sting another day.
Producing a queen bee is a complicated process, so being young, with nimble fingers and good eyesight, is a real advantage. When a fertilised egg is laid, it could become a female worker or a queen. After three days, an egg will become a larva. It is this stage where the “cell” (the space the larva is grown in) and the food it gets will determine whether it is a worker or a queen.
To produce a queen, the cell must have a downward opening and provide plenty of room as queens grow bigger than other bees. Rebecca uses small plastic cells to produce her queens.
To become a queen, the larva has to be fed only royal jelly, which is secreted by bees and also known as “bee milk”. In a “nuc”, which is a small queen-rearing hive, Rebeckah will put a cupful of bees, weighing about 90g, to feed the queen larva.
Once the queen has hatched, which typically takes 15-16 days, she can then be sent to her final destination – and she travels by Royal Mail.
A queen is put into a small plastic container, about the size of a matchbox, with some fellow worker bees to feed her, and they are sent special delivery, heavily labelled as live bees with handling instructions.
Calm temperament
Rebeckah and Ged’s queens are bred for two key traits – high honey production and a calm temperament.
“I met someone recently who said he gets 15 stings every time he goes to check his hive – I was gobsmacked,” says Rebeckah. “I would not put up with that, I have been stung only about 15 times this whole year.”
Did you know?
- Only female bees sting
- Queen bees mate with male drones while flying
- Males die after they have mated
- Thick white honey usually comes from bees that have gathered nectar from oilseed rape
- Wax is secreted by bees from glands on their body. They mould it with their feet
- Bees operate as a monarchy, with only one queen in each hive. If there is more than one, they will fight to the death
Beyond the stings, the working hours are probably the hardest bit of the job, according to Rebeckah. When you are moving hives, you have to wait until all the bees are in the hive. This will typically be around 4-5am, or 8-10pm, so they are not the most sociable hours.
And during queen-rearing season, queens will be hatching daily, so it is seven days a week. Though the hours are long, doing a job she enjoys and a love of being outdoors are more important to Rebeckah.
One subject you don’t expect a bee farmer to speak fondly about is neonicotinoids, given that the European Food Safety Authority reported they pose a risk to bees.
Ged says that he does not believe that is the case, though. In 35 years he has not seen any link between neonic insecticide use on crops and bee health, and his best-ever honey crop came from neonic-dressed oilseed rape – and “those bees went into winter stronger than ever”.
“The lab situations they test them in don’t reflect real life,” says Rebeckah. “It’s like paracetamol: two tablets will cure your headache, a whole box will hurt you.”
“When local farmers approach the neonic subject, I say ‘I’m on your side’,” says Ged, who worries that, without neonics, there will be fewer crops requiring pollination – and they will be able to produce less honey.
Bees are much more than honey, though, says Rebeckah. “You would not have a third of what is on your plate if it weren’t for bees.”
That might make you look at your dinner differently.