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Beekeeping
- Beekeeping (or Apiculture) is the practice of keeping bees (in the case of the Pacific: The Italian honey bee, Apis mellifera
ligustica, and/or the European Black bee, Apis mellifera mellifera or more generally the hybridization of both) for pleasure or profit to produce products; honey, propolis, beeswax, royal jelly and pollen, plus live queen bees and package bees in nucleus colonies. Honey bees may also be used in farming systems to provide pollination. This practice of beekeeping may be on a small scale with a beekeeper owning a few hives or at the more commercial level with a bee farmer managing several hundred hives. Most beekeepers keep bees for the production of honey for income.
- Honey
- Honey is made up of simple sugars; glucose, fructose, maltose, with some sucrose, and is produced by bees from the sucrose sugar found in the nectar of varying plant flowers – it can be used as a table sugar substitute, or in drinks or cooking, or as a marinade or as a preservative. Vitamins, minerals and protein are present in
honey in minuscule amounts, making them nutritionally insignificant. Honey may be made into beer or honey wine (mead) or used as an antibiotic for wound dressing and for alleviating dehydration due to dysentery. NB: Most Pacific people have a tradition of using naturally occurring medicinal remedies and bee products may find some acceptance.
Besides honey there are a number of other products that need to be considered:
- Pollen
- A dust like substance taken from flowers by bees and stored in cells in the hive. Pollen is a nutritious food
high in protein and has
traditionally been collected from bees, frozen, cleaned and placed into retail packages and sold as a protein food supplement.
It requires drying and careful storage to avoid damage by mites, wax moths or rodents. Special traps are needed to harvest pollen.
- Propolis
- Propolis is an antibiotic resin collected by bees from trees and bushes
and used by bees as a glue and preservative in the hive . This substance is scraped
from the interior of the hive by the beekeeper and is then frozen. The propolis is processed by dissolving in alcohol and selling
as a tincture, or drying to a powder for further processing. Propolis is used in natural health care products, mostly due to its
reputed properties as an antibiotic, and it is currently being used in toothpaste, lip balms, capsules and tablets, tinctures,
cough medicines, hand creams and wound dressings.
- Royal jelly
- Secreted by special glands in the bodies of nurse bees, it is the high protein food fed to developing queen and worker bee
larvae. This jelly is collected by a skilled beekeeper via a labour intensive process, and is then frozen for later use.
The substance may be sold in its raw form, a powder (dust or capsulated), or mixed in with other shelf stable products like honey.
It is processed into a number of forms including capsules, tablets and cosmetics, and as a tonic and restorative.
It requires some degree of skill to produce and must be refrigerated or frozen
- Bee Brood
- Bee Brood is a valuable food source, which is eaten raw, pickled or crushed with honeycombs to make honey beer. Brood is a collective term for the eggs,
larvae and pupae of the honeybee.
- Beeswax
- The beekeeper collects beeswax at the time of honey extraction and while also melting down old or damaged combs. Here, the wax
cappings from the honey comb is collected, pressed or spun to remove the residual honey, and then melted and moulded into blocks
for further processing. Most wax is recycled to make new honeycombs for bees. Beeswax is a very stable product used for making wax foundation combs, timber polishes, candles, batik, casting metal objects (lost wax process) as a waterproofing agent and in ointments.
- Nucleus colonies and queen bees
- Bees and queen bees may be produced by the beekeeper for sale to other beekeepers. Nucleus colonies usually comprise of a box of
bees with three or four frames inside (two frames of brood, one frame of honey and pollen). The beekeeper sells the colonies to
others to enable them to develop a new hive colony or replenish a failing one. Queen bees are sold for the purpose of replacement
of old or failed queens, for the maintenance of good production and gentle hive behaviour within a colony.
- Packaged bees
- 1 to 1.5 kg of bees sold with or without a queen bee in a cardboard tube or box with ventilation screens. Package bees contain
no frames to save weight and to meet importing country zoosanitary requirements. This product is often sold to the export market
e.g. New Zealand exports packages to Canada, Korea, Germany while Fiji has sent a consignment to Tonga in December 2001. It is a
market that is fraught with complications and procedures. Domestically, people might buy packaged bees but, as a rule, nucleus
colonies are preferred as they contain frames and brood.·
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- Woodenware
- There is a market for the production and sale of beehive components either in kitset form or ready made. This is a market that
requires precision woodworking equipment and an attention to detail. Recently, an order of hive-ware in Samoa was rejected due to
incorrect measurements used by the manufacturer. The measurement was out by only 3 mm but this was too great a mistake for the
beekeeper. Similar problems have been experienced with local manufacturers in Niue and the Solomon Islands.
- Beekeeping equipment
- Veils, smokers, hive tools, overalls, gloves and other components. A few beekeepers or agents may specialise in the sale of
equipment that is used by the industry. For those involved, it can be a difficult business with profit margins being hard to
maintain. The supply of equipment to the beekeeping industry may be attractive to a few Pacific Island business people. The quality
and price and functionality has to be comparable with imported equipment.