Wild BEE disappeared!
Do you have a jar of honey at home? Do you enjoy eating this viscous, often yellowish spread? To be fair, it can be used for baking or to sweeten drinks, too.
Can you imagine a world without it? That is an absurd question to ask, you might say. Why would there be no honey? It’s not like there is someone catching and imprisoning the bees. Even while this is true, the bee population is decreasing. At this point I should differentiate between honey bees and wild bees. Wild bees play an important part in their eco systems. Honey bees do too but it’s them who beekeepers are taking care of to get honey. The name suggests it, doesn’t it?
Why are bees so important? They fly around getting nectar from blossoms and carry pollen with them. For a lot of trees and other plants this is important. More to that later.
In Schleswig-Holstein an increasing number of people wants to become beekeepers. It’s their intention to prevent a population of bees which is too low. But what does a beekeeper do? The name sounds rather noble.
Not only keepers of faith
Beekeepers have existed for hundreds of years. The first printed book in German about beekeeping was released around the time Martin Luther lived. After that, many books about this topic have been written by priests and pastors. Besides being members of a Christian church, they were self-supporters to a certain point. Just like most of the people back then. To help making their lives easier the priests and pastors wrote manuals.
This shared history of bees and priest is a piece of a puzzle that made me talk to the father of a good friend of mine who is a beekeeper. I got a lot of information from him.
How trees make love
Bees pollinate trees and other plants and arrange for a versatile flora. Cherries and apples would not exist anymore if there weren’t no bees anymore. It would be a disaster if the bees were extinct due to them playing a key role in our eco systems.
I still haven’t answered the question what beekeepers really do. Let’s not waste any more time.
Bees get the pollen while flying from blossom to blossom. Bees don’t do this for the pollen but for the nectar which is important to them. They use it for the honeycombs. They start doing this when the apple trees and rape bloom. At the end of May beekeepers have their first harvest. A second harvest is around July. During that time, they take care of the beehives they have built for the bees. In winter they make sure that the bees are protected from mice and the varroa-mite. When the bees start collecting nectar again, beekeepers usually decide whether they want to focus on harvest or increasing the bee colony. This roughly sums up the work of beekeepers.
I hope you have got an insight into bees and enjoyed reading this post. If you want to learn more about beekeeping I encourage you to do so. Even if you are living in a city you might want to be informed about “Urban Beeing”. That’s it for today. Enjoy your day!
Bye.
