Why Beekeeping?

"If bees disappeared off the surface of the planet, then Man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more life."

Albert Einstein

I guess when most  people think of beekeepers they imagine someone similar to Burt from Burt's Bees and that you have to be a little bit crazy perhaps even cut off from modern day life, well that's what I thought anyway. People don't imagine beekeeping to be a hobby for all ages and all walks of life, especially not a hobby of a 27 year old, vintage dressed woman. I fell into beekeeping accidentally, beekeeping had never even crossed my mind but now I don't see my life without beekeeping in it. My dad had wanted to keep bees for a while and had done an introductory course into beekeeping. One year me and brother clubbed together and bought him a hive for Christmas (thinking bees would magically turn up at the hive door and call it home). Later that year my dad got a nuc and he successfully got them through the winter. The following spring I became fascinated by the little things, I'd find myself watching them for hours, wondering what was going on inside that box- was it really like the Bee Movie!? I asked my dad if I could help out and if he'd teach me, conveniently he also was due to have a knee replacement and needed a bee-sitter, and that was it, I was hooked.

Firstly the fascinate me, they are a matriarchal society, one that runs like clockwork. Every bee knows its place and it's role and sets about devoting their life to the hive, they literally work themselves to death in the summer months and will die defending their home. As Royden Brown said "only the honey bee improves the environment and preys not on any other species" and they are unique in this, the are content with their lives and seem oblivious to the world around them. I can spend hours watching them flying in and out of the hive with pollen, they de-stress me and are my escape from the pressures of modern life.

I find it amazing that these little insects are now almost entirely reliant on beekeepers in the UK, disease means they no longer thrive in the wild. It wasn't until I starter beekeeping I realised just how in danger our honey bees were and how much we need them. Bees pollinate the majority of our fruit and vegetables, they help us produce three quarters of our crops every year and without them it would cost the farm industry millions to find alternative pollination methods. They produce honey, delicious honey, I disliked honey until I had fresh honey from a hive, it's entirely different to the stuff you find in most supermarkets. It takes 12 bees a whole lifetime to produced a teaspoon of the liquid gold honey, so if you like it, you've got to help them! They produce wax and propolis, things we use in everyday life from medicine to candles. It's not just honey bees, since 1990 we've lost 20 species of bee from the UK and even more are under the threat of extinction. 

In our everyday lives we forget about the small things that make the world work- like how our food gets to our table. Many people probably don't even realise how much bees do or how honey is made or where it comes from. The number of beekeepers is slowing increasing in the UK but if we don't make people realise the value of bees or of beekeeping we will loose one of the most important insects we have. We perhaps never ask what hobbies people have, the word 'hobby' isn't exactly the coolest word out there but perhaps find out, you might be as surprised as people are when they find out I'm a beekeeper.