Interesting Facts About Bees And Honey – Over the past six months Phil and I, along with friends Dan and Jess, have embarked upon a new project. Bringing bees and hives to the farm.
We are absolutely committed to making the farm as ecologically positive and sustainable as possible.
Having a bee family here is a brilliant way to embrace that.
There is a wild area well away from the cottages (we ventured in there on foot once, it took us 2 hours to find our way out!!!), so we created a small space in the middle of it with help from a friend.
Phil and Dan went on a beekeeping course in the Spring, we joined Pembrokeshire Beekeeping group and got started.
I thought I knew quite a bit about bees but as it turns out, I didn’t 😊
Here are some of the gems I have recently discovered in our research.
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Honey bees have been on earth for over 100 million years. 93 million years before the first proto humans emerged
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By 3000 BC man had started building purpose designed nests to attract bees. They used pots baskets and mud tubes stacked horizontally to create places that were attractive
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It wasn’t just the honey that humans soon utilised. Beeswax was used in copper objects casting as early as 3000BC
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In a single foraging trip a honey bee will visit around 100 flowers
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All worker foraging bees are females
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A honeybee will make 10 to 15 foraging trips in a single day and visit only one type of flower on any one trip
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Although the key months for honeybees our March to September, they will fly whenever the temperature is above 10 degrees centigrade (50 degrees F), even in winter
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Some types of early flowering weeds are very important to honey bees, these include Daisies, Trefoil, Clover and Dandelions
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Honeybees can’t see the colour red, it looks like black to them and is unappealing
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A honeybee colony in summer can comprise up to 80,000 bees, this drops to around 5,000
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A honeybee only lives 4-6 weeks
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Despite being the mother of every bee and laying up to 2000 eggs a day, the queen is definitely not in charge of the colony: if her laying slows she will be deposed By the other bees in the hive
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The queen controls the sex of her eggs: unfertilised eggs produced male drones: fertilised eggs produce either workers or Queens
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A bee has five different careers during their short lives (approx. 45 days in total). First they are juvenile bees who keep cells clean and warm. Next they become nurse bees who feed larvae. The third stage is House bee, when they produce wax and build honeycomb. The last two stages of their lives they leave the hive, first working as guard bees protecting the hive at the entrance and then finally, only for the last 10 days of their lives they become foragers
Amazing isn’t it!
I’m sure I will discover many more as time goes by.
If you would like to know more about how we got into bee keeping and our honey (including how you can purchase some), please visit the dedicated website which is www.preselihills.co.uk.
