Calm down, calm down! Or, please don’t be stroppy with me…

At last the warmer weather is with us, plants and flowers are flourishing, and the beekeeping season has well and truly started. All of our bee colonies came through the Spring successfully and have grown exponentially in the past few weeks due to the abundance of forage, higher temperatures and relative lack of predators compared to previous years. (To be honest, the Asian hornets don’t usually become a problem until later in the summer but for now we are enjoying their absence around our hives). There are more insects appearing in our gardens, which we see as a positive, but we are often told by people that they don’t like bees as they are frightened of being stung.

This Season’s Fashions

 

Anyone who keeps bees knows that at some point, hopefully ‘later’ rather than ‘sooner’, (but almost never ‘never’!) they will be stung. Honey bees are not usually aggressive, but they are sensitive to being disturbed, and can quickly feel threatened by the presence of anything that distracts them from their work. Their reaction is to defend the colony and this often includes deploying their stings. It’s not true that all bees die when they sting – if they can retract the barb, the mechanism by which the venom is delivered, they’ll live, but often the barb is fatally ripped out of their bodies. Being stung therefore isn’t great for the bee or the person being stung and so it makes sense to disturb them as little as possible and for us to wear adequate protective clothing when we do want to be working with our bees.