Among the Bees at Braziers Park
A story by Heather Banyard
When I arrived at Braziers Park four years ago, I was excited to discover that they already kept bees. My interest in beekeeping began as a child, when a swarm landed in our garden and the local beekeeper suited me up to help remove it. Later, he gave me a tour of his apiary. Ever since, I have jumped at the chance to get involved with bees wherever I have volunteered, so of course it was no different when I came to Braziers.
Here, though, I got to be much more involved. I quickly progressed from assisting our experienced beekeeper, Paul, to collaborating with another new beekeeper, Joe, and his young son. Joe had just completed a local training course, and this year I decided to do the same, augmenting my learning by devouring anything I could find, online and offline, about bees.
It doesn’t seem to matter how much you learn about bees, there is always more to discover and more to watch. How do they survive over winter? How does a colony decide when to rear queens? How do they make honey? And how does a beekeeper prevent thousands of bees from deciding that someone else's roof looks like the perfect place to live? More on that later!
Each of these topics is big enough to fill a book, and working in the Braziers apiary, watching the colonies develop and seeing how they respond to our interventions, has been a wonderful way to keep learning about them first-hand.
Like most beekeepers, we keep Western honey bees, Apis mellifera. But they are just one among around 20,000 known species of bee. Unlike wasps, bees feed their larvae pollen rather than meat, while the adults rely largely on nectar for energy. Different species have evolved different strategies for surviving periods when nectar is scarce. For Western honey bees, the answer is HONEY! And they make a lot of it.
Unlike many other bees, honey bees keep thousands of workers alive throughout the winter, which means there are a lot of mouths to feed. A well-cared-for, strong colony can produce considerably more honey than it needs, which is great news for the sweet-toothed among us. Local honey isn’t just a sweet treat, either. Raw, untreated honey contains antioxidants and other compounds that may have health benefits. That said, it is still sugar and should be eaten in moderation.
Our bees are able to produce so much honey because they can feed on a wide variety of flowers. They have their favourites, such as lavender and knapweed, which provide nectar and pollen, while other flowers are less suited to honey bees. Have you ever noticed, for example, that you don't tend to see honey bees on tomato plants? Bumblebees, on the other hand, love them. They have a special technique called ‘buzz pollination’, where they create a high-pitched vibration that releases pollen which would otherwise be difficult to access. I have spotted them doing this many times at Braziers, and even captured a pair who looked like they were mating at the same time!
At Braziers, we try to nurture a diverse range of flowers and maintain plenty of ‘wild areas’ where native plants can grow. As well as being beneficial for nature in numerous ways, this helps provide food for our bees throughout the flowering season. But it isn't all about honey bees. These areas support many other species of bee, as well as solitary wasps, butterflies, beetles and flies, all of which play important roles in a healthy ecosystem. Some species rely on a single type of flower to survive, so allowing a variety of local flowers, some might even say weeds, to flourish can make a real difference.
It is also worth remembering that the vast majority of wasp and bee species don’t sting. Our honey bees do sting, however, and a bee suit, along with a smoker or sugar water, is therefore a staple of our beekeeping practice. Beekeepers also breed bees to be more docile, as it is important to protect people who might come near the hives. Certainly, one or two stings are all part of the job, but despite dozens of visits to our bees and the training apiary, I haven't been stung once this year.
As responsible beekeepers, we visit our bees once a week for a good part of the year. The key to beekeeping, I feel, is observation. At the heart of many of these visits is an inspection of the brood chamber, where the bees raise their young. It is fascinating simply to see them doing their thing. We check that there are eggs and developing bees, and that the colony has sufficient food, including pollen, nectar, honey and their very own 'bee bread', which is fed to the brood.
We also look out for signs of disease and parasites. One of the major problems affecting honey bees around the world is the Varroa mite. At Braziers, we monitor Varroa using a plastic board underneath the colony. Mites fall onto the board, allowing us to count them and keep track of their numbers.
Varroa mites feed on developing and adult bees, weakening them, and can also spread viruses. At the training apiary, I sadly found a drone, a non-stinging male bee, showing signs of deformed wing virus. As its name suggests, the virus can leave bees with deformed wings and unable to fly, preventing them from carrying out important activities such as foraging and mating.
Managing Varroa requires beekeepers to make decisions about how and when to intervene. As is often the case in beekeeping, there is no single approach to every problem. Various treatments are available and need to be used carefully to control the mites while minimising harm to the colony. Some beekeepers take the more controversial approach of not treating at all, allowing natural selection to take place in the hope that surviving colonies will develop their own ways of coping with Varroa. This comes with a considerably greater risk of losing colonies.
So why do we need to inspect the colonies so often? Because if we don’t, the bees can swarm. Swarming is a natural part of how a honey bee colony reproduces. Thousands of bees leave together as a new colony in search of a home. It is rather extraordinary: a kind of “multi-mental organism” moving through the landscape in search of somewhere to live.* The issue is that their chosen home might be someone's roof, wall or anywhere else with enough room to build comb.
This might sound cute, but bees can be messy house guests. We discovered this ourselves when we had to cut open the wall in one of our guest rooms to extract bees, comb, brood and dripping honey. To try to prevent another sticky situation, we make sure the colonies have enough room to expand, adding space for the bees to raise young and store honey. But even with plenty of room, bees still want to swarm. It is, after all, how the colony reproduces. So we watch for signs that they are preparing to leave and, when necessary, split them into multiple colonies, satisfying some of those swarming urges without finding several thousand bees in another Braziers wall.
My interest in bees at Braziers extends beyond the inhabitants of our apiary. As well as beekeeping, I have spent time monitoring bees, wasps and the lesser-known sawflies, all of which belong to the group Hymenoptera. Back in 2023, I collected specimens once a month at different sites across Braziers and sent them to my friend Ivan for identification. Ivan is a recorder, so as well as becoming part of our own records at Braziers, the observations are now part of the official county records. I was particularly pleased to discover that we recorded three rare species, which suggests we are doing something right.
If this article somehow hasn’t put you off beekeeping and you find yourself champing at the bit to get involved in this fascinating hobby, let us know. I occasionally introduce people to the bees, and who knows, perhaps you might be our next trainee!
*The idea of the “multi-minded organism” has a particular resonance at Braziers. It echoes the “Multi-Mental Social Organism”, a concept associated with Braziers’ early thinking about community and the integrative process, in which many individual minds contribute through interconnected Sensory and Executive functions to the life and development of the community.