1-Star Hive

Some days, customers can be a tough crowd. It’s easy to look at a jar of artisanal honey and wonder why it costs more than the supermarket version, but it's hard to convey just how much work goes into it.

It isn't just about tending to the hives during the spring and summer months. There is also the winter feeding, the endless maintenance of hive parts, the sticky labour of extraction, and the rising cost of glass jars. In an affable mood, I even offered one customer a refund if she returned the glass jar (washed with the label removed!). But no luck! Well, you can't win them all - my wife will just have to have marmalade on her toast in the morning.

Bees are such silly creatures, how on earth have they survived so long? 120 million years since they evolved from wasps and instead of predating insects for protein they took to harvesting pollen instead, developing pollen baskets on their legs called corbicula. 

Their mating rituals are equally baffling. Why do the drones fly off in pursuit of the queen? Winning that race is a literal death sentence. You’d think a sentient drone would say:

"That's alright, Caruthers, I think that queen has the hots for you. Go get her!"

Instead, after a brief moment of connubial bliss, the successful drone is fatally emasculated, falling to the ground while the queen flies miles back to the hive.

Things get worse in the hive: the queen is the titular boss of the brood box which is essentially a maternity ward with fifty thousand cubicle spaces. Her job as chief executive is just to put an egg in every available space while being fed, groomed and cared for by obsequious worker bee minions. 

However, this maternity ward has no Florence Nightingale overseeing it: during the twenty-one days that bees are developing in their cell, food will be spat at them by young worker bees. Emerging bees take on the job of caring for the next generation after first cleaning out their cell by licking it clean. As hygiene standards go this is not good. To anthropomorphise, the health inspectorate wouldn’t even give it a one star review. A few generations of bees and brood comb will go from a pure white wax to look more like fetid cells in a dark dungeon. What started as a pristine nursery can quickly become a breeding ground for viruses and diseases if left unchecked.

The bee’s survival trick is to swarm; chief executive and young bees fly off to create a new home elsewhere. The original hive might go on for another iteration or two but, in the end, the build up of old comb and unhealthy environment will defeat the parent colony and it will die out one winter. Here is where mother nature puts everything right: wax moths, pollen mites and millions of tiny insects and arachnids will feast on the manky remnants of comb and prepare the hive space for a new generation of scout bees.

You want to keep bees? Look after them and renew the foundation and don’t be afraid to do a shook swarm because bees are rubbish at hygiene!