The Zimbabwean Gardener Issue 10 Spring 2014 | Page 16

Bee-ing in your garden

By Louise Bragge

is the beez neez

How and why to make friends
with these busy garden helpers
are the two main questions I
tried to answer whilst speaking
to long time professional bee
keeper Mike Schmolke and his
wife Winkie. Whilst many people
consider bees a nuisance,
learning how they function and
what benefits they bring to the
ecosystem and to human beings
can completely change that old
notion of us versus them.
The African Honey Bee
Meet Apis mellifera scutellata, the
African honey bee. This species is
native to our continent, displaying
typically African characteristics such
as highly social behaviour, performing
excited dances and often unprovoked
aggressive behaviour. The three types
of bee in any colony are the solitary
female ‘Queen bee’ , male drone bees
and female worker bees. As a group,

Ready for a bit of beekeeping

they busily build hives of honeycomb
for their larvae in spring and summer
months. They can forage up to 30kg of
pollen over a year, which they use for
food; pollen contains all their protein,
minerals and vitamins. The nectar,
they collect from the flowes, is their
carbohydrate. The pollen and nectar
are usually collected individually,
not together. The nectar is diligently
converted into honey, which sustains
the bee colony and nurtures the brood.
It is the excess of this liquid gold that
professional beekeepers are able to
harvest without damaging the colony
itself.
At the entrance to a hive, a thick layer
of propolis is made from resins, tree
saps and balsams mixed with honey
and pollen to form a defensive wall
keeping ants and beetles out. A colony
can contain up to 50,000 bees in the
teeming warmer months when pollen
and nectar is plentiful. Female worker
bees toil tirelessly to build up honey
reserves, reducing their lifespan to only
6 weeks, they literally work themselves

to death. In cooler months, worker
bees live for several months and the
Queen bee will survive for two to three
years if well protected and fed by her
colony. The drones, or male bees of the
colony are only useful for reproductive
purposes, they do not carry a sting and
are even driven out of the hive when
they are no longer needed in autumn
months. The drones die after mating,
mirroring the females by working
themselves to death – let’s call it ‘the
unbearable lightness of bee-ing’.
All of this activity goes on quite
unnoticed and without interfering
with human business the majority
of the time. Bees rarely attack
people unless provoked and their
often misunderstood behaviour of
‘swarming’ makes people unnecess \