As a resident of beekeeper TikTok and an avid tea with honey drinker, I have become interested in what beekeepers do and why it is important. Beekeepers keep bees to collect honey, pollinate crops and to produce more bees. Humans have been collecting honey for 10,000 years;honey was even found in King Tut’s tomb. Urban beekeeping is a growing trend and they are healthier than rural bees due to fewer pesticides and more biodiversity. There are over 20,000 species of wild bees that make over 300 different types of honey depending on which flowers they pollinate.
Beekeepers have been around for thousands of years. In Africa, they use birds to help them find hives to collect honey. Early honey collections often destroyed the hives because they did not have the tools to remove the liquid gold safely, killing many bees. This practice is unsustainable because bees are essential pollinators for so many plants. This all changed when Thomas Wildman invented the movable comb hive. The hive allowed honey and combs to be removed from a hive without destroying the bee’s habitat and without harming the population of bees.
Experienced beekeepers do not wear much protective gear. The most important protection is a veil to protect their face because defensive bees are attracted to breathing. Their clothing is light-colored to calm the bees and so the beekeeper does not look like a predator. They have to wash their clothes frequently because bee stings leave a pheromone that insights aggression in other bees and can lead to more stings. Beekeepers also keep smokers that look like lanterns with them to calm the bees and prevent pheromones from spreading through the air.
Today beehives are suffering from Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). This is when many of the worker bees leave the hive-the hives cannot survive without the workers so they die out. About 60 percent of the colonies collapsed in 2008, but on the bright side since then the numbers lost are much lower. Many factors can cause CCD including, parasites, pathogens, poor nutrition, habitat loss, pesticides and climate change. Bees are essential to ecosystems and our food supply, which is why beekeeper’s work is so important. #Savethebees