New Zealand exports about $81 million worth of honey each year. Something I didn’t know about and would’nt have bothered to know until I read this book.
Hannah Norhaus travelled with some of the major beekeepers in the USA looking and listeneing to them as they talk about their methods and also in some cases she worked along side them. She has been stung and learned the hard way that curly hair and bees don’t mix – very hard to get them out of the curls once they decide to be there.
This book mixes history and bee information in a most readable way. It talks aboutwht it takes to be a beekeeper and they tend to be pretty solitary people in direct contrast to the social activity of their hives.
In te USA they truck and transport thousands of hives across states to find the best fields for bees to collect pollin. The fields are a part of the business and are rented out to the beekeepers for the period of the flowering. Honey production is a variable business and there are a variety of things that can halt the production. Pesticides affect bees. A study was done on bees who apparently died for no reason. A residue of DDT was found in the bee even though DDT hadn’t been used in the USA for 25 years. Just shows how much the plant retains of such a chemical.
All beekeepers know about the Varroa mite. It affected bees across the world, and actually there are 4 entirely different species and it has 18 regional genotypes so it is a wiley adversary because it can mutate. You can see that I picked up a huge amount of knowledge from this very readable book.
I learned that neatly mown lawns are a beekeepers anathema. Give them fields of flowering clover or daisies. Posh gardens with designer plants are another malediction for beekeeprs (and people like me too). Go back to the old days of cottage gardens filled with old fashioned flowers which bloomed heartily and encouraged the bees to come to them.
I love this portion of the book where she talks about honey.
“Honey is the distilled nectar of blooming flowers. It is collected by bees, lots and lots of bees. To make a pound of it the 50,000 to 80,000 bees who live together in a hive at the height of summer will travel a collective fifty-five thousand miles and visit more than two million flowers. A hive can collect more than thirty pounds in a single day when the stars align and the nectar gushes.
This is a book filled with interest written with quirkiness and good humour. I never before thought I would be so caught up in the whole business of bees butnow I am determined to make sure my garden is filled with flowers. And I am probably going to be an absolute dinner party bore.