Hives of Activity (pdf) - Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

Hives of activity
ALL IN A DAY’S WORK
Far left and left: the
hives in the Bee Garden
are checked regularly
from spring to autumn
Below, left to right:
Kew’s bees have ample
supplies of nectar to
turn into honey
Bees must be among the most industrious workers at Kew, and there are several hives around the Gardens.
In the second of our new series, Hattie Ellis meets the staff who look after Kew’s busy honey producers
O
Once temperatures start to rise
and the flowers open, bees
emerge from the eight hives
scattered around Kew Gardens.
By summer, they’re feasting on a
botanic banquet. And as the bees get busy,
so do the beekeepers. Quite apart from the
delicious honey, these amateur apiarists
get a close-up view of the fascinating life of
the colony as it moves through the year.
“Every time I open a hive, I feel
amazed,” says Tony Hall, team leader of the
woody collections, who looks after two
hives in the Conservation Area and another
in the woods nearby – he also has an African
log hive suspended in a Mexican oak. “You
can pick up the basics of beekeeping very
quickly, but there’s always more. Every year
is different. It’s one of those things you
never stop learning.”
The apiarists’ work starts at the end of
winter, when they may give their bees some
extra food if the insects’ winter stores of
honey have been exhausted. From spring
onwards, the bees can swarm, which happens
when part of the colony follows the
old queen to set up a new home. While
these balls of bees look alarming, Tony says
such insects are unlikely to sting – they’re
calm, having eaten plenty of honey to enable
them to ‘move house’, and it’s harder for
bees to bend and sting with a full stomach.
John Lonsdale, Kew’s longest-standing
beekeeper, has in the past often filled his
hives with swarms from the wild colonies
nesting in the trees. The insects will settle,
perhaps on a bush or on the bough of a
tree, while scouts look for a new site. At this
point, you can carefully coax the bees into a
box and settle them in a new hive. You then
try to ensure they don’t swarm again by giving
the colony enough space and ensuring
that the current queen rules supreme.
“There’s not a lot of work in beekeeping
for most of the time, but you have to do the
right things at the right time,” says John.
Throughout the summer, the beekeepers
check on their insects to see if they’re laying
well and are free of disease. Such attention
has become especially important since
the worldwide scourge of the varroa mite
PHOTOGRAPHS BY PAUL LITTLE, HEATHER ANGEL/NATURAL VISIONS
KEW Summer 2005 l 23

ALL IN A DAY’S WORK
ALL IN A DAY’S WORK
Left, left to right:
borage flowers are a
favourite with the bees;
Alison Smith, in full
protective gear, removes
combs from the hive
Left: the combs simply
slide into the spinner,
and the honey is driven
out by centrifugal force
– on average around
100lb of honey can be
harvested from each
hive over the summer
Above: mild-tempered
New Zealand bees are
kept in the two hives
in the Bee Garden
Below: the honey is
filtered to remove
any wax debris
PHOTOGRAPHS BY JAMES MORLEY, JOHN LONSDALE, PAUL LITTLE, DAVE DAVIES, CHRISTINA HARRISON
has killed colonies at Kew. For this reason,
it is no longer practical to start new hives
from wild bee swarms.
By late summer, it’s time to harvest the
honey. “You have to be quite nippy,” says
Alison Smith, who tends the two public
hives in the Bee Garden beside Kew Palace.
She places a special perforated board
between the bottom section of the hive
where the insects grow (the brood box) and
the boxes stacked on top (the supers), in
which the bees store their honey. This
means the bees crawl out of the honeycomb
but cannot return.
The next day, she gets in early, closes the
area off to the public and she and her
helpers heave the heavy supers into one of
Kew’s little electric trucks and drive away
quickly so the bees don’t follow their stolen
food. Enough honey is left in the hive for
the bees to feed on over the winter.
The honey is then spun out of its comb
and filtered – or left in the comb, the purest
form of all, containing even more of the
pollens that are said to help relieve hayfever
in those who eat it. Another Kew beekeeper,
Phil Griffiths, samples different
combs as he pots his honey, pondering
what was flowering when to produce such a
range of ambrosial tastes. “I never used to
be a big honey fan,” he says, “but now I
think it’s fantastic.”
Phil’s interest in bees has now extended
beyond the honeybee and into his work
as displays co-ordinator for Kew’s glasshouses.
This year he’s putting pollinating
Above, left to right:
wild bees swarm when
their nest gets too
crowded; in the past,
Kew’s beekeepers used
wild swarms to set up
new hives, but first they
had to catch them!
Right: the beeswax that
caps the honey cells
must be scraped away
Above right: the honey
is then spun out of the
combs in a machine
known as a spinner
bumblebees into the Temperate House, and
planning an unusual experiment putting
South American stingless bees into the
Princess of Wales Conservatory.
Kew’s honey is strikingly floral, coming
as it does from such a great range of flowers.
Tony Hall is so curious about what his bees
eat that he’s having a pollen analysis done
on monthly samples of honey. They may
start early with the crocuses and willow,
then move on to the fruit tree blossoms –
apple, plum, cherry and so on – pollinating
the plants as they go to ensure a good crop.
The Bee Garden has been specially planted
with such famously good bee-forage as
lavender, borage, artichokes and sage.
These days, honeybees can actually do
better in cities with their parks and gardens
than they do in rural areas. Before coming
to west London, John Lonsdale kept bees
in the countryside while working at Wakehurst
Place. “Wakehurst is set in woodland
interspersed with dairy farmland and
monocultures of wheat and barley. Only by
moving the bees to seasonal fields of rape
could a heavy yield be obtained.” At Kew
it’s easy – his London urban bees produce
three times more honey than the Sussex
rural ones did.
For all this bounty, Kew’s beekeepers
don’t produce enough honey to sell to the
public and it’s soon snapped up by friends
and colleagues. However visitors can see
the bees close up in the observation hive in
Climbers and Creepers, and then there are
the display hives and information boards
in the Bee Garden – the hives are set back
behind a fence and stocked with a calm
New Zealand variety.
Unless you interfere with the bees, for
example by standing in the way of their
flight path between the forage flowers and
the hive, you’re most unlikely to be stung.
A honeybee loses its life with its sting, so it’s
their ultimate means of defence rather than
an aggressive weapon of attack. Nonetheless,
Kew’s beekeepers take care when they
open a hive. After all, as well as sweet honey,
each one may contain some 80,000 or so
venomous darts – in such circumstances,
it pays to be on your best behaviour. n
Hattie Ellis’s book Sweetness & Light – the mysterious
history of the honey bee is published by Sceptre
24 l KEW Summer 2005
KEW Summer 2005 l 25