About 65 per cent of the crops we grow in Australia depend on bee pollination. One of the reasons I wanted to keep bees at home was to improve fruit set on my avocados and pumpkins, plus the various vegetables that I grow for seed saving.
European honey bees (Apis mellifera) are incredibly productive. A single colony can easily contain 10,000–60,000 working bees. Each female worker lives for roughly a month and is so effective at pollination that she may forage more than 500 flowers in a round trip.
Since bees travel anywhere up to 10km away to gather pollen and nectar, their pollination services extend way beyond your garden or those of your neighbours.
Backyard beekeeping
If you are allergic to bee stings or feel squeamish around bees, beekeeping may not be the best hobby for you. However, to find out if you like working with bees, go to a beekeeping society’s meeting. Most of them hold regular field days and encourage newcomers to ‘suit up’ to experience what a hive inspection involves, and what it feels like to have thousands of bees buzzing near you. I found the NSW Department of Primary Industries’ two-day introductory beekeeping course an invaluable way to meet beekeepers and to learn alongside experienced amateurs and professionals. Learning techniques such as how often to inspect hives, what to look for and how to manipulate hives for a good honey harvest are best done in the field. Apart from working my first hive, and seeing how a colony operates, I learnt how to keep a hive healthy and identify disease.
Every beekeeper must know how to spot American foul brood disease because reporting it is mandatory. I found the sights and sounds of a hive stimulating. While various strains of bee suit different climates, even my gentle Italian-strain bees are wild animals. They have an ancient memory that black bears are robbers, so beekeepers need to wear white, move steadily and purposefully around hives and avoid smelling sweaty – all things that can upset or antagonise an otherwise docile colony. Bees can be moody creatures. Using perfume or cologne angers them, as does disturbing them on a cold morning or after rainfall.
Positioning the hive
Hives are best located in back gardens away from footpaths (and skateboarders and posties on motorbikes) and other activity areas around the home such as the garage, barbecue or swimming pool. It’s important to place the hive in a spot that’s reliably well drained, away from draughts and where the bees can receive sunshine all day. Early morning sunshine is most important in winter, especially in cool temperate regions, so they warm up and start working early. Don’t keep hives near washing lines. Bees are fastidiously clean, and defecate and drop dead bees and larvae away from the hive – possibly on your washing.
In areas where cane toads occur, siting a hive on top of a table, as I have done, prevents toads from sitting outside the entry hole and gorging themselves on guard bees or latecomers. Placing hives on concrete also helps control hive beetles, which feed on and spoil honey. Beetle larvae crawl out of hives and seek out moist soil where they pupate. Concrete warms up in the sun and helps desiccate beetle larvae, and gives ants a chance to find and eat them.
Making honey
The best beekeepers trick their bees. Left to their own devices, bees make enough honey to feed the entire colony through winter. By manipulating the number of frames in a hive, a good beekeeper can control the size of the colony as well as the honey yield. In a wild hive, the queen bee (who is the biggest bee in the colony) can roam and lay eggs freely. In a managed colony, the queen bee is contained to the lower level, and fills ‘brood’ (bee larvae) boxes. Overcrowded hives swarm, so another trick is creating more room by adding extra boxes to seasonally expand the bee population, which peaks during spring and summer. This stimulates the queen to lay more eggs while her workers make more honey in the spring ‘honey flow’. A golden rule when inspecting hives is to quickly clean up or cover spilled honey with water, sand or sawdust. Spilled honey encourages neighbouring bees to become robbers, which could introduce pests or diseases to your hive. Towards the end of her life cycle, after serving various roles within the hive, a worker bee’s main task is to forage for pollen for food and nectar to make honey.
A worker bee has purpose-built baskets on her legs to collect pollen from flowers and a special stomach to store nectar. On her return to the hive, the forager bee delivers the nectar to the honey-making bees who pass it mouth-to-mouth until the moisture content is reduced. This ‘honey’ is then stored in cells. Once each cell is filled with ripened honey, bees cap it with wax. When the whole box is capped, it’s time to fit an escape board so that, as bees leave, they can’t return. A day later, it’s harvest time. The simplest way to harvest honey is to use an uncapping knife, dipped in boiled water. The frame is put in an extractor and sieved of minor debris. It’s best to extract in a warm room that is sealed from potential robber bees.
Getting started
You’ll first need to find out your local council’s bee policy. Some don’t allow urban beekeeping, while others set limits on hive numbers according to the size of garden. Then you’ll need a beekeeping licence, which is easy and inexpensive to obtain from your local department of primary industries.You need to buy tools, including an extractor, plus protective equipment, a hive and a nucleus colony with a queen and worker bees. Time taken to supply a nucleus colony varies, depending on the weather.
Where to buy supplies
Local beekeeping societies and departments of primary industries can advise you on the nearest suppliers of everything from books and bees to equipment. Government websites are indispensable resources. Supplies, including replacement queen bees, can be delivered by mail. But nucleus hives, sealed for transport, must be promptly installed in the cool of the day, preferably at dawn, which limits how far they can be transported.
Native bees
Most people are surprised to learn that there are more than 1600 species of bees native to Australia. But of most interest to the backyard beekeeper are the stingless bees that store honey – Austroplebeia and Trigona. Stingless bees and European bees co-exist in gardens, and work the same flowers. Often mistaken for fruit fly, these minute black bees are just 4 per cent of the weight of a European honey bee. Best suited to the warmer parts of New South Wales, Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia, they are good alternative pollinators.
Specially designed compact hives need to be in a sheltered spot with shade to protect from hot western and northern sun. Morning sunshine helps stir these bees to action in winter. Stingless bees forage up to 500m from their home and in warm areas a happy colony can produce up to 1kg of sugarbag honey a year. While they are far less productive than their European counterparts, many say sugarbag honey has a distinct ‘bush’ flavour superior to that of honey produced by foreign bees.
To learn about native beekeeping, CSIRO entomologist Tim Heard holds up to five workshops in south-east Queensland a year. Or see the Australian Native Bee Research Centre.
Disappearing act
In late 2006 beekeepers from North America reported that 30–50 per cent of their charges had vanished. It seemed bees were dying in their millions and no-one knew why. Called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), it can affect European honey bees. Indicators of CCD include absence of all adult bees and the presence of capped brood still in the hive. This is a telltale sign, as a healthy colony does not leave unhatched young.
Searching for answers
Although beekeepers are at a loss to understand the cause of bee fatalities, they recognise the symptoms. It is not known if CCD is a new phenonemon, or one that has previously had little impact. Suspected factors include: bee malnutrition; toxic levels of pesticides; attack by varroa mites, tracheal mites or hive beetles, all of which can decimate a colony; and electromagnetic radiation from mobile phone towers, which is thought to lead to disorientation and death among bees. One characteristic of CCD is pre-departure stress in colonies, mainly involving drought or poor nutrition. Bees may become malnourished on a monoculture diet when they are used to pollinate a single crop, such as almonds in California in the US, instead of foraging a variety of plants. Another factor implicated in CDD is contamination. Robber bees often visit the hives of collapsed colonies, become infected themselves then take pests to new sites. Australian bees have so far escaped CDD thanks to our relative isolation.
Serious situation
Since the outbreak of CCD in 2006, a huge number of cases have been confirmed in Europe. The German Professional Beekeepers’ Association reports that 50–60 per cent of their bees have died. Some beekeepers have lost all their hives. The disappearance of bees is potentially very serious, with far-reaching consequences, as so many crops need to be pollinated by bees before the plants can produce food.
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