A light hearted guide to beekeeping and bee products

Here you can find out :

About bee products

What beekeepers do

What Apidologists do

The Cape honeybee curiosity

What do Beekeepers do?

Beekeepers provide rental apartments and cluster housing to bees. These homes are called beehives and are designed to be better than wild real estate (as far as the bees are concerned). Bees like to be close to flowers, hence beekeepers often move the beehives from one place where there are flowers to another, so that the bees always have work.

As one can see, this wild beehive is not in an ideal location. It is drafty, cramped and made half out of metal, half wood. In winter the bees get cold as all their heat gets lost through the metal and they must then eat lots of honey to keep warm.

In the picture to the right Phumlani Honi shows the honey rent paid by the bees in the beehives next to him. As you can see, the manmade hives are far better places for the bees to live.

By working with the bees, beekeepers help the bees lead a better quality of life than if they did not have help. As a result they are able to make more honey, propolis and pollen. The beekeeper can then take a certain percentage of this as rental income in exchange for looking after the bees. If the beekeeper takes too much, the bees are being cheated and they will leave - and then the beekeeper is not a beekeeper as the bees left.

Now, there is another type of Beekeeper called an Apidologist.

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