Keeping bees is a real buzz

Be industrious: it’s not hard to keep honeybees in London
10 April 2012

Bees in the capital produce some of the country's best-flavoured honey, thanks to the huge variety of flowers that grow here.

I've got a jar of "London Honey" and it's delicious: runny, clear and full of flavour.

Bees are vital because they pollinate a third of what we eat - the yields of most fruits, vegetables and nuts are much greater when pollinated by honeybees. The service honeybees provide to our economy has been costed at £200 million a year.

Without honeybees, our diet would consist of rice, bread and potatoes.

Birds and animals also rely on honeybees to pollinate the berries and fruits they eat.

The only reason plants flower is to attract insects, including honeybees, to pollinate them, in return for a sweet nectar drink. So no honeybees, no flowers.

It's not as difficult to keep honeybees in London as you might think. You can keep a hive in a back garden or, better still, on a rooftop, but you do need some technical know-how.

On 25 October there's an introductory course on urban bee-keeping from 11-4pm in Battersea, which costs £35.

To book a place go to www.urbanbees.co.uk. The course will answer all your basic questions.

If you do decide to become an urban beekeeper, not only will you guarantee yourself a year-long supply of honey, you will also be helping the environment.

As a new film, The Vanishing of the Bees, shows, honeybees are in peril.

Last year we lost almost a third to a variety of assailants: the parasitic varroa mite, which sucks the bee's blood and spreads viruses; modern monoculture farming practices, which rob honeybees of a nutritious diet; new pesticides, which could be interfering with the bees' navigation system and weakening their immune system; a shrinking gene pool, since we breed one type of honeybee all over the world that is gentle and productive but not necessarily as suited to certain climates as indigenous species.

The British "black" honeybee may be more suitable for our increasingly wet summers than the Italian bee we use at the moment.

The Eden Project has just launched the Big Bulb Plant, to encourage us to plant bulbs not just for ourselves but also to brighten up patches of public land.

You need to register as a community to qualify for this competition: the first 100 applications get 250 free bulbs apiece.

To find out more, go to www.thebigbulbplant.com.

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