|
Wild swarms
With the speed at which the queen lays eggs, the colony
can quickly become cramped for living space and will then decide to create another colony
with a new queen bee. Or an old queen bee may be afraid of being killed by a recently born
substitute and so decide to leave her hive, taking her colony with her.
This is
called swarming
. The bees send guides to locate the ideal place for a new colony:
a crevice in a wall or rock, a roof, a hollow tree trunk... Then they form a humming
cluster that gathers closely around the queen bee and settle temporarily (on a branch for
example). Once the place is located, they settle, build wax bars and return to their usual
activities.
Wild swarms can be found anywhere in nature. It
was from these natural swarms that Man long collected the honey and wax essential for
their diet and housing. But collection was hazardous and difficult, and often led to the
total destruction of the hive. So people decided to capture the swarms and keep them in
shelters that they had built and from where the honey could be collected more easily.
This
is how beekeeping and bee-breeding began.
|
|
The first forms of beekeeping:
|
|
The first traces of beekeeping go back to the
remotest antiquity. The Chinese, Greeks, Romans and Egyptians had straw or terracotta
hives. For a long time in Europe,
honey
was the only means of sweetening
food before the arrival of sugar cane or sugar beet, and
wax
was
necessary for lighting: so, beekeeping developed quickly. We know that in the reign of
Charlemagne, beekeeping practice was regulated.Beekeepers have learnt to domesticate bees,
capture the swarms and to house them in appropriate places: pots, hollowed-out tree
trunks, stripped barks of the cork-oak, straw baskets or in many forms of woven wicker
baskets.
|
|
|
Hives with fixed combs meant smaller
collections, but beekeepers could put several hives in different places. The only drawback
was that gathering the honey often led to the total destruction of the combs and the
colony.
|
|
To solve this problem,
the
super
was invented: it is a removable, stacking hive compartment, which
"sits on top" of the
brood chamber of the hive
: the bees build
honeycombs and store honey there as soon as the body of the hive is full.
Only the
honey in the super is gathered, while the brood cells and the colony's "food
stocks" stay in the main compartment..
|
|
It was in the nineteenth century
that François Huber, the forerunner of modern beekeeping, invented the hive with
removable frames
: the bees build honeycombs inside the wooden frames which can
be removed, lifted and handled, making it easier to inspect the hive and gather the honey.
|
|
|
Later on, rectangular honeycomb foundations were
fixed to the frames to speed up the bees' building work and give them more time to
produce more honey. These frames are like the ones in use today. Nowadays, the most
frequently used models of hive are those designed by
Langstroth
, an
American, and
Dadant
, a Frenchman: these models are square compartments
with a flat wooden roof onto which one or several shelves can be fitted.
|
|
There are currently three types of
beekeepers : amateurs with two or three hives for whom beekeeping is a hobby, people who
keep bees to supplement their income, and professionals. In France, there are about
2
million hives
altogether.
|
|
Extracting honey:
Honey'extraction is made in
a honey house
. The supers
of the hives are taken there (once the bees have been smoked out). The frames are then
uncapped
.
The uncapped frames are placed in an extractor that revolves at high speed.
|
|
|
|
he centrifugal effect projects the honey from
the combs onto
the extractor
walls; the honey gathers at the bottom,
pouring out through a tap into a filter. If the honey is too viscous, as can be the case
particularly with heather honey, the beekeeper uses
a pricking machine
, a
machine equipped with a multitude of needles, which makes the honey more fluid.
|
|
Then, the honey settles in
a honey ripener
: the wax fragments rise to the surface forming an easy-to-remove layer. All
the equipment used is made from stainless steel so that the honey remains pure. The honey
will be then packaged in tins or parcels depending on its destination in the distribution
network.
|
|
