RosanneHood
Unregistered User
(5/21/01 6:57 pm) Reply
"Every garden should have bees"
When I was a child, we lived in Manurewa which is about 60kms south of Auckland, New Zealand. Uncle Bob lived near by. Uncle Bob had a wonderful garden, wild and bushy, pretty with flowers, a chuckling creek wandering through a little gully, and a beehive. “Every garden should have bees,” said Uncle Bob. And he’d let us watch them flying in and out of the hive, explain how they collected pollen from the flowers, told us all about their role in pollination, and every summer we would get a big jar of honey, and each of us three kids would get a gooey strip of comb to suck and chew on.
“Every garden should have bees,” I told my mother, but she was not impressed. “Uncle Bob has bees, and that’s enough.”
Well, seeing as it was no go to have bees in our garden, then life went on. You can’t have bees without a garden. So years of uni and teaching and travelling and always flatting meant that bees were forgotten, and honey came from supermarket shelves.
In 1984 Martin and I were married. He lived at Giralang, but the house was too small, so we bought a bare and treeless block in McKellar in 1985 at the Government Auction and built a house there. The house was finished in 1986.We moved in. We set about with great industry to alter the barren landscape and planted hundreds of bushes and shrubs and a fair few trees. And all this industry in the garden, now that, after all these years, I actually HAD a garden, brought back a forgotten memory about what Uncle Bob had said.
“This garden,” I said to Martin, “needs bees.”
We weren’t sure how to find bees, so we looked in the Yellow Pages. Bindaree Bees was the only listing. I rang them up. Most certainly we could get bees, and everything else we’d need. There seemed to be a lot of stuff we’d need. We brought home stacks of bits and pieces and learnt how to assemble bee boxes, make frames and fix wax. When everything was painted and ship shape, we got the bees in a nuke box. And so, with no drama at all, bees arrived in my garden in November 1986. They were the quietest, most docile bees. It was like they were almost tame. There were so few of them, you could almost think of giving them names. They buzzed quietly about in our garden and seemed to appreciate my choice of flowering shrubbery. Madam Queen was easy to find, she was long and slim, and always somewhere in the middle four frames of the brood box. There was one super on top.
In January 1987 we did our first extraction. We hired an extractor and a steam driven hot knife from Bindaree Bees. I had a veil for my sunhat, and wore a long sleeved shirt and jeans. I had not a spot of bother in taking the top super away, it was like the bees knew I was going to do this. Martin filled the kitchen with steam and learnt how to strip the cappings off by doing it. I covered everything in the kitchen with a fine dusting of honey as I flexed my muscles with the extractor for 8 frames. Cleaning everything up took tenfold the amount of time and effort that getting the honey had taken. We got 12kgs of honey, and I’d never seen so much honey before in my life. Martin sold some at work for $2.00 per kilo, and I investigated the making of Mead.
Well, that’s how I got started with bees. It was all due to Uncle Bob. Uncle Bob is now 96. He’s still eating honey. He doesn’t keep bees any more, but the caretaker does in the beautiful garden at the old peoples home where he lives. For after all, so far as Uncle Bob was always concerned, every garden should have bees.
(migrated from an original posting made in February 2000)
JanetGablonski
Unregistered User
(5/21/01 7:07 pm) Reply
How I got mine
The story of how I got my bees is as follows. There is a hedge out the front of our house made up of various native shrubs. My brother was helping me trim them when he discovered our friends in a beautiful wild hive in a shrub. I thought about keeping them but we couldn't leave them there as it faces on to the road. They were very tolerant of us staring at them, and all the neighbours came for a look. My father, who kept bees as a boy, suggested we put them in a hive because they were not aggressive. I rang a friend of mine who keeps bees, for some advice. He put me on to Dick at Bindaree Bees.
Dick generously came over and helped me put the bees in a box. We took the wild comb with brood in it and strapped it into empty frames. That was to encourage them to go in. It was not neat as you probably can imagine and we got a very artistic result when they began to fill in the gaps. We also gave them a few frames with foundation on to start them off. Once they were settled we put a super on and moved the frames with wild comb on upstairs and gave them some more frames with foundation on to build up the brood comb downstairs. We also put in a queen excluder.
And off we went. I wanted them to settle in and the brood which got moved to the top box to hatch before I did anything. There was lots of drone brood which naturally died because of the queen excluder. When it was all empty it was time for me to mess up the kitchen and laundry. I took all the old comb out and replaced the labyrinth they had made with nice neat frames and foundation. With much squeezing and mess in the laundry tub I got about two litres of honey and I rendered the wax. In all it was a major achievement because it so fascinates my little daughter and I!
It is a marvellously satisfying feeling to deal with something so potentially dangerous and get such a result. Twenty years down the track I hope to still have our bees. My grandmother taught us to always treat to bees nicely. She also said that one who keeps bees is, of necessity, a very nice person!
I have my Dad's treasured ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture and a beginners book which Dick gave me when he came out to help me get the bees in the hive. The Internet is also a handy place to derive information. There is however, nothing to replace doing it yourself!
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