Wasps made beeline for the hive but there was a sting in the tale

One of the first things that almost everyone asks you when you start to keep bees is when will you get any honey. The second thing is usually can they have a jar. After all they have seen your bees on their flowers so they feel they really should be due for a share.

Unfortunately, it is not a question of when you will get some honey. It is a question of if. It is also far from certain that it was actually honeybees that your neighbours have seen in their garden.

The classic bee that most people know from illustrations and designs is not a honey bee at all. It is a bumble bee. These are larger, fatter and rounder than a honey bee and, if truth be told, they are also prettier.

Bumblebees tend to have beautiful stripes and colours and come in lots of varieties some of which have attractive features such as nice white furry bottoms.

By comparison honeybees are pretty mundane looking things with plain grey brown stripes and unspectacular appearances. Indeed it can, for the inexperienced eye, be quite difficult to tell them apart from wasps which are much the same shape and size but a lot yellower. They do, however, have one major attraction over bumble bees. They make honey and bumblebees don’t.

A queen bumblebee gets through the winter all alone snuggled up in the warmest spot she can find. Often this is underground or in a wall. When it comes to spring you can see the large queen bumblebee emerge, feed on flowers and then try and find a larger hole in the ground where she can start to lay a few eggs and raise enough daughters so that she can stay in the nest laying more eggs whilst they do all the foraging work.

Eventually, they will build up a colony of perhaps 200 bees and if you have a nest like this in your garden the best thing to do is to leave it alone. When winter approaches the queen will start to produce some male bumblebees and some new queens and with a bit of luck these will mate, the nest will then be abandoned and the queens will head off to try and find a nice hole in the ground where they can start the whole thing over again.

Though none of this activity produces any honey they are incredibly useful animals. Until recently all of them were completely wild and yet they have always done a great deal of the work of pollination without any help from beekeepers or farmers. In the last few years glass house farmers have been importing large numbers of mass produced bumblebees to help with tomato pollination and the like. This carries a serious chance that they also import diseases and put at risk all the wild populations and all that wonderful natural pollination. But for now we still have 27 different varieties of native bumblebees in Britain.

By comparison there is only one species of honeybee in this country. And because we have already imported honeybee pests and diseases it is hard enough for them to produce enough food to survive and even tougher if something steals it. As I see things, the whole work of the tens of thousands of bees in a honeybee colony is directed at using the spring and summer to collect and store enough honey to be able to feed and raise the kids whilst putting enough in the larder to get through the winter.

As autumn comes on wasps start to be very determined in their pursuit of anything sweet and become a real pest. It is of course important for the professional beekeeper to be vigilant in identifying these potential threats and very proficient at spotting the different kinds of bees and the arrival of any wasps. Which is why I missed them completely and it took 12-year-old Duncan to spot the wasps. Duncan was inspired by a talk at his school to want to look at some bees and his mother suggested that he might like to help me out and to see what goes on inside their home. I carefully suited him up, opened up the hive and started to explain to him in great depth the intricacies of keeping bees and what to look for. He pointed his finger and started to ask with great simplicity whether that yellow thing should be there.

“Ah,” I said, using my best and most pompous experienced beekeeper voice “you do get the occasional wasp at this time of year trying to see whether they can steal some honey.”

He thought for a short while and then, using his most polite and tactful voice, pointed out all the other wasps that I had failed to notice. There was a full scale war going on with a colony of wasps trying every trick in the book to get into the hive and I had just helped them out by opening the top. I thought I had better talk to Mike, who partners me on looking after the bees.

Mike looked the problem up on the internet.

We narrowed down the entrance to the hives so that the bees had a better chance of fighting off the wasps. And then next to the hive he put some strawberry jam in a jar with a narrow entrance and some water. Before long the wasps had decided they preferred strawberry jam to honey and then discovered that they couldn’t find their way out of the jar and had drowned. Bees are more sensible – they left it alone.

Waiting for the honey

Our bees and their limited supply of honey were safe for a while. I promised Duncan that, as his reward for vigilance and tact he could have one of the first jars of our home-made honey.

He asked very nicely when this would be.

For some reason he looked a touch disappointed when I told him that I doubted whether there would be any honey this year but that there might be some late next spring.