Peter has 100 hives in private backyards spread over Stonnington, Booroondara and Whitehorse. He collects the honey, giving some to the people and sells the rest. Bees are important for 30-40% of food. Only pollinated flowers produce seeds. There is no relationship between European honey bees, which use the nectar and pollen and European wasps which live underground. Wasps like refined sugar and fats. There are 2,500 species of native bees in Australia. Bee swarms occur in spring. Worker bees will create other queens within the hive, and the existing queen will either kill those new cells or leave the hive with 20,000 bees, moving 500 m from the original hive. The swarm will hang together and look for a new home. Bees will only sting if threatened or the hive is being attacked. It is safer to scrape off stings, which will then have no effect. The sting needle should not be squeezed, as the poison will enter the body and is effective in one minute. This is not a big problem unless the person is hyper allergenic. 500 bee stings will kill.
1kg of honey requires 5 million visits to flowers. The flower nectar goes to the bee’s honey stomach with enzymes. It is then spat out to younger bees in the hive, giving them the older bees’ enzymes, then packed into honeycomb cells and the nectar fanned to evaporate any water to less than 18%. Raw honey does not go bad and was found in the Pyramids. Peter brought a hive which fits 40-50,000 bees. The bees keep the hive temperature at 30 degrees all winter using their body heat. More boxes can be added on top of the first one if it is full of bees, with a queen excluder between. He explained how the honey was produced, with the max then the honey being removed from the frame. Royal Jelly is secreted from the bees’ heads to feed the babies. If fed for 7 days, the baby will become a queen. There are around 40,000 workers, 1 queen and 150 drones waiting to mate with the Queen. Once the drones have mated, they will die. In winter the workers evict the drones and they die. Worker bees live 3-4 weeks in summer and 3 months in winter. Honey can be used for burns and bacterial infections.
