Bees

For me although I had looked forward very much to obtaining and keeping bees it is not for want of something to do, for may people it's
a hobby or pastime in its own right.

I however want bees for two things one because I want to utilise their honey to replace sugar in our diet, moving us even closer to our
goal of self-sufficiency, and two because they provide a very important service for us in pollination of crops on our smallholding.

Our newly planted orchard will benefit year after year from the industrious endeavours of the bees increasing the trees ability to produce a bountiful crop.

Successful pollination of field crops is also very important to us especially maize; as it is the crop that provides us the ability to overcome the yearly drought our region of France suffers from.

For the last four years we have seen the grass go over to a brown dead growth-less prairie offering nothing for our dairy cows and their offspring to eat. Maize has offered us the opportunity to overcome this shortage of food for our cows and has even improved their milk production without the need to buy in supplemental food from outside. The importance of this is indisputable; for us here at Le Bois de Grammont milk is lifeblood; offering us milk, cream, butter, and cheese, not to mention skimmed milk, which we feed to the pigs and their offspring. The interrelationship of each layer of our endeavours here becomes more and more complex as we enter in to each new dimension of our work with the land and the animals we raise on it, however this complexity is what keeps it interesting and challenging.

Last year 2006 we where given our first nucleus of bees in exchange for helping fellow smallholders and friends kill their pigs back in the winter of 2005, this was a welcome exchange.

I supplied our friends with a second-hand hive I had bought from a local farmer who no longer had a use for it; they installed four frames of drawn honeycomb with bees and a queen in residence.

Later we added some more frames with newly installed wax sheets and gradually moved the original drawn frames to the outside of the hive, until one night just after dark they delivered the hive to my home and helped me install it in the orchard. Late last summer I eventually moved the original frames to the extreme outside of the hive; this spring when the temperature rises above 16c I will take the original frames out and replace them with new frames, and install a super to collect honey from later in the summer.