Both wild and domesticated bee species facilitate pollination that helps agricultural production and supports ecological diversity. Many species of bees have been domesticated throughout human history. The bees in the genus Apis, collectively called the honeybees, were the first to be domesticated about 7,000 years ago. These were domesticated because they produce a variety of products that we use or consume, including honey and wax. Both of which are produced in large enough quantities to be harvested and farmed by humans. There are also easily managed by keeping them in hives, which has promoted a long history of apiculture in human society. Apiculture is the maintenance of honeybee colonies by humans and hives built by people. It is an important part of our agriculture, economy, and environmental health, and is now an important global practice. We know from cave paintings of bees and honey collection that the exploitation of honeybees has been happening for at least 9,000 years. Honey is a sweet carbohydrate-rich food that is still consumed by people all around the globe. There are more than 80 million managed beehives around the world that together produce about 1.6 million tons of honey every year. In Canada, over 700,000 managed honeybee colonies produced more than 43 million kilograms of honey, valued at $230 million in 2015, most of which is produced in the Prairie provinces. Most of the honey production around the world comes from the domesticated honeybee. While honeybees were originally kept solely for the purposes of honey and wax production, other bee products used by people include bee pollen, and royal jelly as nutritional supplements, and royal jelly in beauty products. Besides the products we obtain from farming honeybees, bees also provide important environmental services. Honeybees are generalist pollinators that forage on a variety of flowers. In fact, a recent study found that honeybees are the most common visitors to flowers in natural ecosystems. While the presence of honeybees may have adverse effects on the diversity of native bees due to this competition, they remain extremely important for global food production. Almonds, for example, are entirely dependent on honeybee pollination. Without honeybees, we would have much more difficulty cultivating important crops such as apples, avocados, sunflowers, certain strains of canola, cherries, and many others. Honeybees are responsible for 80 percent of all insect crop pollination and contribute to more than $19 billion every year to agricultural crop production in the United States alone. In Canada, the estimated value of honeybee pollination to key crops is over two billion dollars. The most important honeybee pollinated crops in Canada include apples, blueberries, and canola. Today, beekeeping is widespread from bee farmers in greenhouses to backyard beekeeping. Virtually, anyone can become involved in apiculture. To do it safely though, beekeepers must use personal protective equipment such as special sting proof clothing and smokers, which calm the bees. Modern day beekeepers often farm honeybees for their honey, which can be produced in large quantities during the summer months. We got an in-depth look at a large honey harvesting facility in the province of Alberta, one of the largest honey producing regions in the world. We spoke with Mike DeJong, the owner and operator of Busy Bee Farm here in Alberta. We are at Busy Bee Farm in our storage shaw facility, and behind us is all a bunch of our honey supers that are getting stored away for the rest of the year and waiting for the next year's crop. I was running about 8,000 beehives. We come out of winter. We assess the hive, saw what survived and see what we're playing with them. We use some spring management where we grade the hives. We control our queen management and may splits all of the strong ones to recover our winter losses. We then start super and getting ready for the harvest. In our business, we also have hives going to pollination through the end of June. We try bringing them down to Southern Alberta. Now, the honey harvest commences, and it's pretty intense through July and the first parts of August. Then, we start getting ready for wintertime, and feeding them up, and doing diseases and light management, and covering them up. Although our extracting facility, we are pretty automatic or semi-automatic compared to sideline or smaller guy. Doing it as a hobby, they would be more manual. Techniques we've pulling honey. I mean, it's all beekeepers pull honey all the same way whether you're big or small. It's just what they used for their management practices, but it's a very labor-intensive job. Everybody is going to work to get that honey off whether it's one hive or 8,000. I think I'll say Alberta would be, I think averages around 130, 150 pounds a hive. You only have one window to get ready for winter, and that's through September and maybe October. Sometimes when it comes early and you don't know everything done by, you got to be fast than what you're doing. You've got to feed, and feed, and feed. You got to get their bulk stores up, so that they have access to enough sugar or honey in their hive. They consume sugar or honey. They turn that into energy and they may heat all winter long. If they run out of that stuff, they're going to starve to death. Then with insulating, we have installation on the top of their hive to stop heat from coming out, and then we cover more than insulated tarp and groups of four, and it's basically like a Christmas present. We wrap them up in a cube with a black tarp with some our value do it, and it collects the solar rays, and it stops the wind. We collect wax just as a byproduct of extracting and other than that, we leave the bees all the poem, making collects that we find that essential to their strength. Other than that, we provide a pollination service out of this business. Biggest thing right now with beekeeping in Alberta is probably the varroa mite. It's always a consistent battle taking or managing them and keeping their populations close to if zero. They thrive through the summers as the bees thrive as well. You do your controls in the spring, and then you have a window in the fall to do your fall controls and get them as low as possible for winter time. There's a fungal disease too called nosema that's tough on the bees, especially through winter since the bees can't fly, unless it's warm. But there are periods where they can't fly for two months. We feed type of antibiotic for them to control that. Varroa mite, let's say if you have a high population of varroa mite and it's out of control, all you can do is put the miticides in and baby your hives. If you're too late, you're going to lose your hives over the winter. With nosema, there's colm replacement. There's disinfection through radiation. Queen management is a big thing. Our business imports a lot of queens from Hawaii and California. We don't raise our own. In our management style, we need to have our hives ready to go for production or at the right strength for pollination. So we buy queens by the thousands through California from a supplier who we're pretty confident in. Then we also have suppliers out of Hawaii as well, just to get some diversity. That's still done through me. Yeah, we are assessing basically pretty simple. We're just basically strong medium week and all our strong hives gets split from right away. That controls the swarming. Its work hard at it. Stay consistent. Be ready to adapt because it's never the same every single year. Sure. The bees are amazing. They are. If you step back and look at it, I think it's amazing what they do. We've got a passion for it than most beekeepers. It's nothing like collecting that crop. On a scale like this now it's maybe a little different. I get to see the bees but a lot more management in that. But still when you step back and look at things, it's amazing what they can do. So bees are probably up there as my favorite insects. The first bee domesticated by humans was Apis mellifera, sometimes called the European honey bee. It is thought to have been introduced to Europe in the 17th century from either Africa or Asia, then into North America and other parts of the world. The biology and behavior of European honey bees makes them valuable pollinators, great honey producers and well-suited to the semi-natural conditions of domestication. In nature, this species lives in large colonies and nests in natural cavities. So it's a smooth transition to move them into artificial hives made by people. European honey bees can regulate their nest temperature. This means that entire colonies can overwinter.. The hives stay warm over winter but no foraging or brewed rearing occurs at this time. In other bee species in cold climates only queens can overwinter and must start a new colony every spring. African relatives of the European honeybee are also raised and farmed for honey. African honeybees were interbred with European honey bees and introduced into South America in an attempt to improve the beekeeping industry in Brazil. This is because European honey bees are poorly adapted to tropical climates. When African honey bees mate with their European cousins, they produce an aggressively defensive hybrid called the Africanized honey bee. Unfortunately, the Africanized bees can enter and take over other honeybee hives. These hybrids will pursue attackers further and have more hive guards than regular European honey bees. This has led Africanized honey bees to be a cause for concern in areas of Central America and the Southern United States where they are invasive. Although they are often referred to as killer bees in the media due to their aggressive nature, their venom is no more potent than that of the European honey bees. Species of honey bees other than Apis mellifera are also farmed around the world for their honey. Apis cerana, the Asiatic honeybee is commonly kept in hives across Asia. They generally have smaller colonies and produce less honey than their European cousins. However, some researchers have suggested that the Asiatic honeybee may be more tolerant to parasitic mite investigations and can survive in lower temperatures than the European honeybee. In Southeast Asia, honey from the giant honeybee Apis dorsata is harvested from wild colonies. This large bee species produces a lot of honey, but has never been domesticated because it does not nest in enclosed cavities. The giant honeybee also tends to be more aggressive than European honey bees likely due to its exposed nesting habits. Apis florea, the dwarf honeybee is much smaller than the European honeybee and produces less honey per hive. Like the giant honey bees, they nest out in the open and are not domesticated. They are however important pollinators in Southern Asia and their honey is sometimes harvested by local farmers. Api culture is an ancient practice that has spread across the world due to the demand for this sweet substance we call honey. Today, multiple species of honeybees are farmed for this sugary treat and other products. Many are also managed for pollination services of important crops. The most common species of domesticated honeybee across the world is the European honeybee, Apis mellifera. In the next few lessons we will discuss several aspects of European honeybee biology, including cast determination, physical and behavioral adaptations as well as communication.
