Bees in your backyard

Experienced backyard beekeeper Ben Wells checks on a hive at his home in Wakapuwaka.

There’s a buzz around bees these days that isn’t entirely of their own making. Hives are springing up in suburban backyards across the region as townsfolk look to support an insect that is worth its weight in gold.

Words: Britt Coker | Tessa Jaine

“Mate, the bees know.” Ben Wells is recalling a conversation he had with Chester, an elderly neighbour who was teaching Ben about beekeeping. I am imagining a young Luke Skywalker listening to Master Yoda. “I was asking question after question because I was hungry to learn and he went, ‘Mate, the bees know’. Ben laughs. “And I went, ‘oh’”. I went through a lot of beekeeping and always thought about that. Chester wasn’t some prokeeper, but he was connected to them…. One time, he lost his bees two years in a row and he was in tears.” Ben Wells has been a beekeeper for about eight years. It started for him in that Luke/Yoda mentoring kind of way, so he skipped joining the bee club option but recommends it for anyone starting out as there is a lot to learn and keeping a beehive going requires an investment of time, money and plenty of knowledge. There are several big challenges for the bees within Nelson suburbia. Varroa mite, American Foul Brood (AFB), herb/pesticides, Argentine ants and tutu - a native plant the bees like to visit for the honeydew excretion from scale insects. Tutu is lethal enough to fell a curious circus elephant, and has. Most beekeepers use chemicals to control Varroa and AFB and everyone who sells or shares their honey needs to get it tested first as our region has plenty of tutu. With the Argentine ants, Ben surrounds his hives with water to create a moat, but it’s not a fix-all. Norbert Klose is an organic (uncertified) beekeeper who has been selling his honey at the Nelson market for 22 years. He uses wooden materials for his hives and organically-approved methods to combat pests and diseases. Do his bees recognise him? Kind of, maybe. “They would notice that people behave differently… They can see fast movements; they can’t see slow ones. If you don’t move much or very little, you’re basically like a tree. They see fast movements really slow, that’s how they perceive it.”

Norbet Klose, a familiar face at The Nelson Market, with his Norb's Gold Raw Organic Honey, practices organically-approved methods to care for and maintain his beehives.

The buzz on bees

Worker bees produce about 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey in their lifetime.

On one flight from the hive to collect honey, a honey bee will visit between 50 and 100 flowers.

Honey bees communicate by ‘dancing’. They do a waggle dance which tells other bees the distance and direction of food.

The honey bee beats its wings 11,400 times per minute, which makes their buzzing sound.

In summer, the queen bee can lay as many as 1,500 eggs every day.

“The beehive is just the home of the hive, the colony is the body. The way I see it, the bee colony is the body that expands during the day and shrinks at night... Like us, we have trillions of cells.” Norb says the bees communicate by sound and smell because in the hive it’s completely dark. “When they want to defend themselves they make a different sound, or if they have no queen they have a quite loud humming sound because there is a lot of worry in the hive - it means they are slowly dying… The queen can also make a beeping sound.” When they’re out flower-hunting, it’s the ultraviolet rays that light up like runway lights on a landing strip. The bee can see ultraviolet-even on a cloudy day, which makes it easier for them to make a beeline to the waiting nectar. If living with pet bees sounds appealing, but not the maintenance, backyard bee hobbyists can always hire hives and have someone else take responsibility for the little critters. Norb says there is a difference between two roles, “are you a beekeeper, or keeping bees?” Either way your hive needs a sunny, sheltered spot raised off the ground. Maybe also avoid creating a flight path that crosses your washing line since bees don’t do their business inside the hive. Bee poo is sticky, but no surprises there considering their diet. Hive-hiring obviously incurs a cost but is hasslefree, as the householder you get more honey than you can eat, and plenty of backyard buzz to tune into. If you have a hive you can also forget about stopping to smell the roses, because Ben reckons observing the insect that pollinates the roses is where the joy through stillness really lies. “It's a thing, bee watching. A type of meditation sitting down and watching a beehive, watching them go in and out. There’s something to be said for that.” Don’t worry if they come to check you out. “People go to whack it away, but the bees have no interest in harming you. If they sting you, it kills them... It’s only if they’re trying to protect their hives and their babies. When we open their hives up is when they show aggression and that’s a good natural trait to have.” They eat pollen and nectar but Ben has also observed them feeding on seaweed compost, turning over bark piles to access the mycelium (white threads of fungal goodness) and coating themselves in the shiny resin that new leaf shoots are encased in. It’s an anti-viral, anti-bacterial coating for the leaf but the bees scrape it off and take it home for self-medication. Combine with a bit of bee spit and wax and they have their highly-prized propolis. “We’re building robotic bees, but we’ve got the most amazing system already here and no human system has ever been better than what nature has provided. The way that symbiotic relationships work between insects and plants. It’s such an amazing system.” It’s a matriarchal society within a beehive. The worker bees are all female while the male drone bees are roving Casanovas. Neither of these roles do anything for challenging engrained stereotypes. But, hey ho. At least they’re all unpaid equally. Interestingly, summer worker bees only live for about six weeks, but winter worker bees can live for six months. The difference in longevity is driven by built in martyrdom. The summer bees die before winter so there are not masses of them sitting around eating all the honey. It’s a much smaller collective that live through the winter months, for the greater good. Ben describes the colony as a collective consciousness. “There is a lot we can learn from the bees. They are a superorganism, and they function as one. I think the way that every bee’s best intention is for the greater good of the colony, it’s not for himself. Our society is very different from that. If one bee gets sick it will fly away from the hive to die so it won’t infect the other bees.” Please, no one leave home if you are feeling unwell. But perhaps, check in with your neighbours if they are. In the spirit of collective conscientiousness! Bees pollinate about one-third of the world’s food crops. That’s a lot of pressure. So if you want to help them with their work, don’t spray chemicals on your property. If you have to, do it at dusk after they’ve gone to bed. Access to water is helpful but they drown easily so lean a stick inside the bowl so they can clamber out.

If your social circle is bereft of an apiarian Jedi master, you’ll find advice and connections through the local club, nelsonbeekeepers.org.nz. NMIT also runs several beekeeping courses for people seeking official qualifications and in-depth knowledge - though mate, it’ll always be a fraction of what the bees know.