Busy as a bee

PAM Todd certainly knows how to fill a man with confidence. We're standing at the entrance to the field near Askham Bryan where she keeps nine of her 18 beehives - and she just can't resist a little joke.

Sometimes, she says, the bees come to meet you as you go through the gate. "They treat you as though you were a bear, apparently," she tells me, deftly adjusting my gauze protective veil. "The first thing they go for is the eyes. Then it's the wrists and the groin."

It's just what I want to hear. As we approach the hives, I discreetly check myself to make sure there's nowhere an angry bee can get in: but it doesn't make me feel a whole lot better.

I watch from a safe distance while Pam and her husband Mike, who assists her, lift a comb crawling with bees out of a hive to inspect it.

The air around them is soon thick with flying insects, and there's a deep and ominous hum in the air. Even where I am, several yards away, I get buzzed. But Pam and Mike, protected by specially-designed suits, masks and gloves, seem unfazed.

Getting stung is an occupational hazard, Pam admits. Since she took up bee-keeping five years ago, she reckons she's been stung on average a couple of times a week at least.

You do build up immunity after a while, she says - unless you're allergic to bee stings, in which case you should stay well away - but it's still unpleasant.

So why does she keep bees? "I enjoy it," she says. "It's a lot of hard work, I don't much like honey and it doesn't bring much money in.

"But I do love watching the bees, the way they work together. The social organisation is just incredible. They work as a whole colony. You don't think of them as one bee, you think of them as a colony."

People could learn much from the way honey bees work together, Pam says. At this time of year, when flowers are in bloom and workers are out gathering nectar, a hive can contain as many as 50,000 bees.

Each one knows exactly what its role in life is. There's the Queen, whose sole function is to lay eggs - up to 3,000 a day at this time of year. She is fed and cleaned by her army of worker bees: the ordinary bees, all female, that we see hovering around flowers in the summer months on their endless job of collecting nectar and pollen.

The life of the worker bee is pure drudgery. For the first two weeks of their four-week lives, they work around the hive, cleaning, repairing, building honeycomb and feeding the Queen and her Drones, the male bees. For the final two weeks, they fly ceaseless foraging missions to gather nectar.

It's a sobering thought, Pam says, that 12 little worker bees work the whole of their lives to produce just a teaspoonful of honey - something you might think of next time you spread a dollop on fresh bread.

The workers work so hard in their short lives, Pam says, that by the time they die, their wings are literally in shreds. "The saying 'busy as a bee' is no exaggeration," says Pam's husband Mike.

Except when it comes to the Drones, that is: the male bees who loiter around the hive being waited on by workers and whose sole function is to fertilise the Queen.

Even for them, though, it's not all a bed of roses. They may be pampered while alive: but once a Drone has mated with a Queen, he dies. And by September, as the hive prepares for winter, Drones who have survived the summer are driven out by workers and left to die, their usefulness over.

The most astonishing thing about bees, though, is the way workers "tell" each other where there is a good source of nectar and pollen. A worker bee who has just returned from a successful foraging expedition will perform an elaborate figure-of-eight dance, from which her co-workers can tell exactly how far away and in what direction the flowers are. They can even tell how much food is there. "If the dance is very frenzied, it means there's a lot," says Pam.

For those who don't know it, this is the swarming season - the time of year when some bee colonies split into two or more, and great clouds of bees fly off together to start a new colony. It only happens in May, June and early July, when new young Queens hatch out. A colony will only tolerate one Queen - so if more are born, they either fight to the death or one (sometimes more) leaves with a bunch of up to 25,000 deserters to strike out on her own.

A swarm can be pretty frightening - especially if it settles in your garden. But beekeepers like Pam say please, think before you call in the pest control officer. They will simply kill the bees - and honey bees, which play an essential part in nature by helping to pollinate flowers, are already endangered by the varroa mite, which has virtually wiped out wild populations.

Most local bee-keepers would be delighted to come and take the bees off your hands instead, Pam says.

"So if you have a swarm in your garden, please don't panic," she says. "Just stay away and phone us. We'll arrive armed with boxes, buckets, sheets and a spare honeycomb to bribe them to come with us. Getting a beekeeper involved ensures you and your property are safe, and you'll learn a lot about one of the most important and hard-working little creatures on our planet."

u If you have a swarm, contact Pam on 01904 707408, or Tom Robinson, secretary of the York and District Beekeepers Association, on 01904 626170.

Updated: 09:34 Saturday, June 23, 2001