Chris Chapple, our own member, is an Honorary Professor of Sheffield University and is now making more time to pursue his hobbies. A consultant urologist, today Chris was wearing his other hat as a trustee of the Sheffield Beekeepers’ Association.
Since the age of 13, he has been interested in beekeeping and his talk covered: the honeybee’s evolution, the subspecies, the composition of the hive and novel genetics, a history of beekeeping, the equipment, diseases and predators, manipulation, the beekeeping yea rand products of the hive.
The human species began to transition from apes around 60 million years ago. Bees probably appeared around the arrival of flowering plants over 74 million years ago, with the true honeybee 22 to 25 million years ago. There are at least 30 sub-species of the Apis Mellifera honeybee. Humans have been collecting honey for at least 8,000 years.
Honeybees create their nest in cavities that have been stolen from for their honey by many animals as well as ourselves. Humans until recently built hives for honeybees to inhabit and then to destroy whilst collecting the honey. The traditional coiled straw rope is such a hive. These skeps have been used in Britain since Roman times until a hundred years ago. They have been supplanted by wooden hives that give access to honey without having to be destroyed.
Bees enter the hive at the lowest level and there are several levels that can be accessed by removing the roof and removing honeycombs suspended from rails spanning the width of the hive. A bee colony is centred around a Queen that will lay 800,000 eggs in her lifetime and secretes a pheromone that keeps the other females sterile. Drones are male bees from unfertilized eggs. They lack stingers and cannot collect pollen or nectar; their only job is to mate with the Queen after which they die. They are only produced when the hive is healthy and they do not survive the winter.
Worker bees are female with short lives (one month) and have many jobs besides gathering food and nectar. They preserve honey, feed drones, build the honeycomb, store pollen and remove the dead, carry water, fan the hive to maintain temperature and guard against invaders.
Chris’s talk included details of a number of diseases and predators that bees succumb to, the Asian Hornet is a new non-native invasive predator of note and perhaps surprisingly mice at this time of year can be problematic.
Whilst bees are remarkable in many ways perhaps the way in which workers inform other workers of the location and distance from the hive of a new food source is especially remarkable. The information is broadcast in the dark by a special dance that Chris explained to the amazement of his audience. This was a memorable and enjoyable talk, packed with fascinating information that this blog cannot hope to cover.