Tiffany Francis-Baker - Bees and Beekeeping

A honeybee gathers nectar from the spring blossoms.

H ONEYBEES HOLD A special place in many peoples hearts. A species which is ancient, intelligent and mysterious, bees can be seen as mediators between humans and the rest of the natural world. They are independent and free, yet they embrace the homes we provide for them and even allow us to keep them. The symbiotic relationship between bees and beekeepers has been nurtured for thousands of years. In many ancient cultures the bee was a symbol of power and nobility, a precious creature to care for in exchange for sweet, golden honey. Today, our love of the honeybee is undiminished and perhaps even intensified by the global threats that the species is facing of intensive farming, pesticides, disease and habitat loss. Now, more than ever, we need to rediscover the appreciation and admiration so many of us feel for honeybees, and recognise the role they can play in the future of our planet.

A worker bee tends to the comb where new grubs are starting to emerge.

T HE MODERN HONEYBEE comes from one of the most ancient species on the planet, which appeared at least 50 million years ago. Its ancestors, the first bees on Earth, came into being around 130 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the world and humans were not yet in existence. At this time, there were very few flowers on Earth, and seed dispersal by the wind was an inefficient path to reproduction. As a solution, winged insects gradually evolved to feed on the nutritious pollen; as they moved from flower to flower, they scattered pollen grains and began to pollinate the plants. This new relationship changed the Earths entire ecosystem. It became an advantage to the plants to attract bees, which led to flowers that were bigger, brighter, more colourful and more richly scented. They also began to produce nectar, a sugar-rich reward for insects like bees a nd butterflies.

The first bees evolved from wasps, which stocked their nests with the bodies of other insects in order to feed their young. At some point, a few of these wasps began to stock their nests with protein-rich pollen instead of insects, and through the process of natural selection, the first bees began to evolve. Biologists are unsure exactly when this happened as insect fossils are rare, but some ancient bee species have been found trapped in tree resin, fossilised into amber, which was able to be extracted and analysed. The oldest-known amber bee is around 80 million years old and from an advanced social species that lived in vast colonies; so many scientists believe the earliest bees evolved lon g before this.

Honeybees have evolved alongside plants over millions of years in order to pollinate the Earths flowers.

The first bees evolved from wasps, which stocked their nests with the bodies of other insects in order to feed their young.

These early species of bee were almost certainly solitary bees, just like the majority of the species still found today. As a general rule, present-day solitary bees, such as carder, mining and leafcutter bees, live alone and build their nests in small holes in the ground. They will then lay their eggs, seal the nests up and leave their young to develop on their own. Most solitary bees feed on the same nectar-rich flowers but do not produce honey. Modern bumblebees are more sociable insects and, like honeybees, form colonies with a single queen. However, their colonies are much smaller than those of honeybees, with as few as fifty individuals in a nest; bumblebees can also be identified by their distinctive round, fuzzy bodies covered in soft hair. Surprisingly, of the estimated 20,000 species of bee found around the world, there are only seven species and forty-four subspecies of honeybee. The most common of these is the European or Western honeybee ( Apis mellifera ), which is found on all continents except Antarctica, and is the species from which most of the worlds commerci al honey comes.

The earliest species of bee were almost certainly solitary bees, similar to the modern leafcutter bee.