The honey bee (apis melifera) is the only species of bee that collects nectar and stores it as a food source during the summer so that they all may live on it over winter. This way, the whole colony will survive the winter and emerge in the spring to start the cycle again. Although man has learned to harvest the bees’ honey and to keep them in apiaries, bees are a wild animal and can never be domesticated. This means that beekeepers have to learn to understand their natural instincts and behaviours – they cannot be farmed.
Bees live in a hive with up to 50 to 60, 000 female workers, 300 to 400 male drones, and 1 queen. The hive is a perfect Super Organism governed not by the queen, as many think, but by a powerful, genetically coded, collective sense of common purpose. They live in the dark and communicate by movement, vibration and scent. The queen’s sole purpose is to produce eggs and proliferate the colony and her family line. She mates just once in her early life and may then live for up to 4 years, laying up to 2000 eggs per day.
Nightingale Farm was traditionally a home for bees as this like many other rural homes and farms had an interest in bees and beekeeping. There were hives where we currently have ours as far back as anyone around can remember. In the Eighties the practice of beekeeping fell into national decline with the advance of a pest called Varroa and the buzz of Nightingale Farm's bees faded.
In 2009, we decided to reintroduce some bees and two colonies were brought from the home of an elderly family member in Gloucester as he could no longer look after them as he wished. The bees are now hived in our small apiary in the heart this environmentally sensitive area on the Somerset Levels and Moors. The Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) near Aller and Beer Woods provides a unique microclimate for them. The foraging bees range over a large area of the wetlands meadows covering North Moor and Kings Sedgemoor as well as the woodland behind.
Honey
Honey is nectar, that the bees collect, made thick and sticky by evaporation. They have an army of foragers to go out and get this nectar and the house bees turn it into honey and store it in the comb. Foragers will range up to 3 miles from their hive in search of nectar, pollen, water and propolis (a sticky plant resin that they use as glue in the hive). This potential range of almost 30 square miles provides the bees with a large variety of food sources.
During the spring, when the bees are building up their colonies after the winter, the important nectar and pollen sources locally are: willow, hazel, hawthorn, fruit blossom, bluebell, dandelion and buttercup. There is usually a gap in the forage during June when the bees rely on their spring stores until in July they are able to gather their main crop, which in this area are: lime, blackberry, field thistle and other summer plants.
Many beekeepers will place their bees in fields of oil seed rape during late spring and fields of beans (grown for cattle fodder) during summer. The bees find these two crops irresistible and will work them doggedly; collecting large quantities of nectar and pollen for their stores. This enables beekeepers to produce larger amounts of honey for sale to meet the strong demand. However, there is little or no oil seed rape or field beans within the bees' flying range at Nightingale Farm. Instead given our location, our bees forage on a variety of natural plants and habitats to produce smaller amounts of tasty honey from predominantly native ancient wetland plants.
We love Nightingale Farm honey's fragrant and complex taste. It is full of aroma and a world away from mass produced honey normally found in supermarkets.