Keeping bees in the garden

The next step on from chickens is probably bees. They don’t take up much space, they’re easy to look after and they make honey, which has so many uses in the self-sufficient household.

I’m still a little apprehensive about keeping them in the garden, but that’s probably because of popular misconceptions; nobody wants to get stung, after all. But the clever people at Omlet who made our chicken house are now shipping the beehaus, which is designed specifically for back yard bee keepers.

Blagger got in touch with Omlet’s Johannes Paul to talk about the new beehaus, why regular home owners might want to keep bees in their garden and how they can turn you a tidy profit.

‘Before I kept bees I would get up in the morning, brush my teeth, leave the house and go to work,’ Johannes told us. ‘Now I get up and look out the window and think about how the weather will affect my bees. Is it warm and sunny? The bees will have already put in a good two hours worth of work collecting nectar and pollen. Is it raining and windy? The bees will be peering out of the entrance, bored and unable to fly until it clears up again.’

Looking after bees gives you a reason to be interested in the world around you. Johannes admits that might sound strange, but being responsible for his own bees means he has a vested interest in their ability to collect nectar from which to make honey and he takes much more interest in the changing seasons and daily weather. They are also the ideal way to re-connect with the world around us.

‘If you live in a built up environment, do your weekly shop in a supermarket and can’t remember the last time you had earth under your fingernails, keeping bees translates into a connection to nature,’ Johannes believes. ‘The bees are operating on a stripped down, straightforward and single minded programme of survival that is fascinating to watch and learn from. On top of all this they provide delicious honey!’

The Omlet beehaus looks as unconventional and modern as the company’s chicken coops. Where most bees live in wooden huts, these are made of vibrant coloured plastic, and are around twice as long as a regular hive. It’s a radical re-think, but Omlet designed the beehaus with modern life in mind. The traditional wooden beehive was invented in the 1920s, and was designed to provide commercial beekeepers with a simple, cheap hive that could be easily transported to wherever the bees would find the most forage.

‘It wasn’t designed for garden beekeepers whose needs are very different,’ Johannes explained. ‘The beehaus is the first hive designed specifically for hobby beekeepers. It allows the bees to grow their colony horizontally without the need for stacking boxes on top of each other. The legs raise the top of the hive to a comfortable working height. The boxes which hold the honey are much lighter – only 7kg as opposed to around 18kg on a traditional hive. On top of this it looks great.’

In a good year a hive of that size should be enough to bag you 50kg – 100kg of honey, which at high street prices could earn you up to £700, easily offsetting the cost of the beehaus.

Bees are key to human survival. They pollinate a large proportion of the crops that we eat, and quite simply the world couldn’t support us all without them. Keeping bees at home needn’t be just a hobby, then; it’s also an environmentally responsible pass time and, unlike keeping chickens, you don’t first need to seek permission from your local authority or check the deeds of your house.

‘If you own your house you don’t need to ask the council for permission to keep bees, if you are a tenant though you should check with your landlord. The best advice I can give if you have neighbours is to tell them that you plan to get bees and then explain whats involved.’

But what about that quite understandable fear of stings? Johannes assures us that back garden beekeeping is perfectly safe.

‘You won’t see many more bees even if you have a beehaus in your garden. Bees aren’t interested in humans, they like flowers! They like them so much they will fly up to 3 miles from the hive to find the best ones. The only area that you need to be aware of is directly infront of the hive where the bees are flying in and out. Once they have left the hive they quickly disperse. The beehaus makes it straightforward to manage the colony so that swarming can be controlled too. Bees are a really important part of our food chain, providing an invaluable service pollinating many of the crops we eat.’

Related posts:

1. Your chicken-keeping questions answered
2. Building an Omlet Eglu Cube
3. We find a dead fox in the garden
4. How cosy is a chicken coop?
5. The chickens get a new home

Tagged as: bees