Did you know bee-keeping is mankind’s oldest recorded form of animal husbandry? It’s not surprising our ancestors risked being stung (quite literally sometimes to death) in order to learn the complex way of the hive in order to extract a jar of honey. This ambrosia of flowers and result of pollinator alchemy has fed, healed and restored generations of humans and yet we know so little about what makes a bee so extraordinary.

In order to uncover their magic we asked an apiarist to describe his fascination with these little marvels during his journey towards understanding and working in harmony with them.

I never tire learning about bees. Since the age of 23 I have been on an adventure born out of love for the land and that of a girl that set me on my path to mastering honey production.

I was managing a Kiwi fruit farm that produced about 130 tons a year. The owner decided that bees would really help pollinate his crop, but he was way too ‘stingy’ to pay for professional pollination from experienced bee-keepers. The first experience I had of robbing a hive went like this: It was an old Langstroth hive that had been left, neglected, for years on an old trailer in a field. The farmer gave me a veil that didn’t close and no gloves. He suggested I use woollen socks on my hands instead, not knowing that wool invites bees to sting, and suggested I perform this duty at sunset. This is not a good time to steal a swarm’s honey because ALL their field workers are home for the night. My girlfriend and brother were safely locked in the cab of the bakkie while I struggled trying to light the broken smoker, which did not work (no matter how much I swore at it). I eventually decided to dispense with its use completely, breaking the one cardinal rule of stealing honey from a hive. Without smoke the bees can operate as well as any disciplined military unit… you know the kind who drank sake and flew their planes into the decks of enemy ships. No one bothered to tell me this!

That night I got chased by 40 000 angry bees for about 5 kms, dodging and weaving the bakkie in and out of plantations, kiwi vines and cattle paddocks. Neither my girlfriend nor brother were prepared to let me in the cab with them so by the time I had lost most of the suicidal bees I lay on the floor while my so called loved ones took 36 stings out of my throat, wrists and ankles.

Tip: If you are stung by a bee use a sharp blade to pierce the skin but make sure you rung against the barb of the sting otherwise you end up puncturing the sac that holds the sting.

I woke up very quickly after this. I learned that there are two kinds of bee-keepers…those who keep bees and get to do all the cool stuff like look for the queen and learn interesting facts, and those who are kept by their bees…these are the honey farmers, and like most livestock farmers, things are not quite so rosy.

You have to keep bees alive even if it means culling diseased colonies. You have to kill bees just in the process of farming the honey the honey lovers get to eat. You have to treat bees for diseases and parasites and you have to feed them if a food source dries up. One of the worst things you have to do is engage in all out warfare with people who believe that it is their right to steal honey from your bee box.

Yeah, there are bee-keepers and bee-keepers and it has only been my genuine love for these amazing creatures that has kept me going through thick and thin for 19 years.

During future columns I will tell you more about the different aspects of my bee-keeping career; from rural development to research, trying to save the African bee, to learning to deal with the hybrid that has subsequently been created due to our failed efforts. But I was asked to describe some of the magic things that caught my attention about them in the first place.

So let’s start with sex. That always gets everyone’s attention. Did you know that a hive is a completely female society? There are drone bees but they are there only to mate with a newly hatched queen. The queen only mates at the beginning of her lifecycle but will do so with as many drones as possible over a period of a few days. The drones don’t survive the pairing but that is not cause for too much concern as very few will even get the chance to perform this task. There is only one queen in a hive and after the mating period she can live for up to 9 years.

I started to discover things about bees and swarms that I could only explain as either magic or proof of God, or both.

The queen bee can lay over 2000 eggs a day in her prime and she controls all the functions that occur in the hive through pheromones secreted from special glands. She also communicates with her hive through other subtle techniques. One queen can control a colony of 150 000 bees but the bizarre thing is that she is descended from the same egg as any other worker bee in that colony.

Bees that live for about 9 weeks have very specific tasks to perform at very specific times of their lives before they crawl off to die. They look different and in almost every way they are different, but the thing that changes the worker bee’s characteristics is not due to genes but due to the food she is fed in her larval stage. This food is called royal jelly and is a substance that is made not by the queen but by the worker bee. This substance is so powerful that it can literally transform life…

The journey into the world of bees continues next week. Article: Wayne Myburgh