It is a bright spring day as I make my way towards the coast near the town of Falmouth. This stunning seaside location is home to an unexpected horde of rather busy residents. As I step out of my car I can see the white box-shaped hives behind a low hedge just metres from the sea and I can also hear the low rumbling hum of bees enjoying the spring sunshine.
I am here to meet conservationist Bob Black who has kindly agreed to talk to me about his love of our native Cornish Black Bee, what we can do to help them in our gardens and of course let me get up close to his own bees.
The sad fact is that bees are in trouble. In recent years the news coverage of their plight has become increasingly worrying. There are roughly two thousand species of bee in Europe but one in ten of those is now endangered. There is no single cause for the bees’ decline, studies have pointed to changes in climate, pesticides and a rise in devastating diseases such as varroa as the root of the problem. Frighteningly some figures estimate that bee populations have fallen by a staggering 75% in the past century.
With this in mind the My Cornwall team decided it was time that we found out what we can all be doing to help, how we can make a positive impact on these wonderful insects who play such a vital role in our delicate ecosystem.
One of the first things I say to Bob as we struggle into our protective thick cotton suits, complete with hoods and veils, is how surprised I am that you can keep bees so close to the sea. He tells me that they don’t mind at all, “it just restricts their foraging a little”. Bob has forgotten more about bee keeping than I will ever know and has become deeply involved in the conservation and promotion of our native Cornish bee in the past 7 years.
You can be forgiven for not knowing that Cornwall has its own native bee. Up until recently they were thought to be extinct, wiped out in the 1920s, along with most Northern Europe’s honey bee population, by Isle of Wight disease. After this disaster British beekeepers were forced to import bees from southern Europe – mostly Italy and that is a trend that has continued. In recent years however small colonies of our native bees have been located in isolated pockets in Cornwall, Wales and Scotland.
Britain has nearly 300 different species of bees but most of them are the large furry balls we all see bumbling around the garden. They are Solitary, Humble or Bumble bees and don’t produce honey for us although they do do the important job of pollinating our plants and flowers.
As we reach the hives the humming becomes more intense and I can see the small dark shapes of the bees buzzing around, swooping in and out. Done up as I am in all the safety gear and now sporting a pair of oversizing leather gauntlet type gloves I begin to feel a little apprehensive but Bob, who is softly spoken and exudes calm, gently lifts the roof on the first hive and immediately I am mesmerised. The bees don’t seem at all worried as he slowly lifts out the frames to show me, some containing the brood (the nursery where the infant bees are being raised) and some the stocks of honey. Each frame is covered with a wriggling mass of small black and pale yellow striped shapes tumbling over each other, each going about their own important business.
Unfortunately honey bees are often mistaken for wasps, they are much smaller and slimmer than wild bees and have similar stripy abdomens – so try to think twice before you swat and remember a honey bee will only ever sting you as a last resort because unlike wasps she will die afterwards.
And that’s another thing that Bob taught me, did you know that of the 60 – 80,000 honey bees in a hive nearly all are female? There are a few males called drones but they only make up about 10% of the colony and as Bob puts it “all they do is hang around waiting for a chance to mate with the queen!” Being a bee is no holiday for the females though. A single (lady) worker bee will travel up to 5 miles from her hive in search of pollen and it takes around 55,000 bee miles to produce just one jar of honey.
Bob opens up two different hives to give me the opportunity to compare our native bee with the hybrids brought from Europe. The hybrid bees are far yellower, the Cornish bees look more black and white like a Saint Pirans flag! The Cornish honey bee is actually a variant of the British Black Bee (Apis Melifera Melifera) but importantly they have slight evolutionary adaptations which mean that they are naturally better adapted to our unpredictable Cornish climate.
Cornish Black Bees are especially hardy and can survive colder winters than their European cousins, vitally they will also go out and gather pollen in poor weather, even a bit of mizzle doesn’t put them off. They are placid, generally good-tempered, so less likely to swarm. But perhaps most importantly they seem to show a particular hardiness to the varroa mite. They are hairier which means the mite finds it more difficult to get to their skin. These unique qualities mean that their promotion amongst and adoption by local beekeepers could potentially mean a securer, healthier bee population in our county.
Bob is understandably passionate about promoting the Cornish bee, “The more people that take on board this native bee, not importing, and working with the strains that work best in their area you are going to naturally develop over 30 years or so a really good strain of local bees that are going to be dominant.”
Bob works with projects such as the B4 Group, the Bee Improvement Programme in Cornwall (BipCo) and the Cornish Bee Improvement and Bee Breeders Group (CBIBBG) as well as individual beekeepers to protect and promote our native bee and help with bee conservation as a whole.
“In Cornwall with our wonderful peninsula, the west of the county could have pure native bees within a generation, very easily and then we wouldn’t have to send off for bees we could get them from the local area.”
Besides providing us with their wonderful sweet, golden harvest bees are also vital to the natural world, to our own survival and many conservation groups are keen to encourage more people to take up beekeeping. I asked Bob about this, he agreed “It’s good to see more younger people, especially those in their 30s and 40s, are getting into beekeeping but there is a lot to learn. I recommend taking a course over the winter at Duchy College or similar to properly understand the complexities of bee colonies and good animal husbandry.”
Bob, who has bees in 5 sites across west Cornwall, chuckles and adds “Keeping bees is not something you do to make money, although it is completely absorbing and I think it’s cheaper than golf!”
(to go inside hexagonal boxes)
BEE FACTS:
· Bees can fly up to 15mph
· They navigate using the sun
· Bees communicate by dancing
· A bees sense of smell is so acute they have been trained to detect drugs and bombs
· Each foraging trip a bee will visit between 50 and 100 flowers
· Each colony of bees has its own distinctive smell, that’s how they recognise each other
Some Simple Ways to Help Bees:
· Try to buy organic
· Chose locally grown produce
· Avoid using pesticides in your garden
· Leave a patch of lawn free from mowing to let wild flowers grow
· Plant bee friendly plants
· Support your local beekeeper by buying local honey
Some Bee Friendly Plants:
· Clover
· Lavender
· Honeysuckle
· Buddleia
· Fruit blossom – apple, cherry, plum etc
· Rosemary
· Heather
· Willow
· Hazel
· Dandelion
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