lessons from a bee farmer

I have just been to a thoroughly entertaining lecture on commercial bee farming.  There are some commercial bee farmers in the UK, though not very many: their association has only around three hundred members, and of those only a hundred are farming on a really large scale with more than five hundred hives.  Our local bee farmer has scaled down to just under a hundred now he is in his late sixties and as he says, his knees have gone.

Bee farming has many advantages in his view, one of them being the comparative lack of competition, though he admitted that he started as a regular farmer keeping the bees on the side as a hobby, albeit a large scale one, and only made the final step to concentrating solely on bees once his mortgage was paid off.  Most people know what honey is, and many like it, so the bee farmer doesn't have to promote the virtues of an unfamiliar foodstuff.  Honey can be stored at ambient temperature, no chilling or freezing required, and can be kept from one year to the next, so the bee farmer can smooth out ups and downs in production and keep customers supplied fifty two weeks of the year.  That certainly sounds easier than lettuces, which have to be kept chilled, and who wants to buy last week's lettuce?

There is little technical innovation in beekeeping, and most of the equipment lasts for decades, so the capital requirements are lower than for many enterprises.  It hasn't felt like that to me this year as I've been sending off what are rapidly becoming monthly orders to Mann Lake, but he's right.  The brood boxes and roofs I've bought this year will still be perfectly serviceable long after I've given up beekeeping.

It's a job that you do outdoors in nice weather in the summer, but not in the winter.  You can avoid the rush hour traffic, as most apiary tasks don't need to happen before about ten in the morning. Outlets tend to be pretty loyal to their honey supplier, and he has been selling to some of the same shops for decades.  When they run low on stocks they call him, and he takes some more jars round.

It is a physical job, he admits.  His annual production runs to tonnes of honey, and every pound of it is lifted several times, what with hive inspections and then collecting the full supers from the hives and unloading and processing them at the other end.  That bit doesn't worry me so much.  There is only one snag that I can see, and that is that you have to get a honey crop from your bees. Stopping them swarming is absolutely crucial.  Our professional bee farmer does not clip his queens, and rarely marks them, but he must be able to see the blessed things.  He advocates Buckfast pedigree queens, which he says make productive colonies and will go for three years without swarming, but faced with swarming he pre-empts them by swarming them artificially.  I am sure he has a natural talent for beekeeping, but it must help that he started keeping bees when he was fifteen so by now has over fifty years experience.