Imagine stripping naked and then donning industrial strength clothing before practicing your hobby. JILL CAMPBELL MACKAY meets a man for whom this is a daily occurrence
WHENEVER Bob Tucker feels the urge to indulge in his chosen hobby he first has to strip naked then, with the able assistance of his wife Linda, he dons an industrial-style white boiler suit. He also sports a thick veil of dark mesh which hangs like an ominous cloud from the broad brim of his white hat.
Once this has been completed, Bob is able to carefully approach his bee hives, with tin smoker (with attached bellows) in hand. Visiting Bob can be an unnerving experience; a low but constant hum emanates from the many hives at the end of the garden which makes fearful folk like me eager to make a run for it.
Sitting a reassuring distance from the hives in his bee-friendly garden, Bob explained his almost life long passion for bees. “I was 12 and my biology teacher kept bees. From then on I became fascinated with them and throughout my working life have always tried to keep bees. As we were preparing to leave the UK to come and live here we had to offload around 700lb of honey from my previous hives before we could depart.”
At which point I had to ask: ‘How many times have you been stung?’ “Loads of times, but the worst ones are if the sting gets under your toes, now that’s dam sore. But the advice is to never ever squeeze a bee sting, that sends the venom further into the skin. Use a sharp tool to scrape off the sting; the bee sting often gets torn away from her body with the poison sac still attached so if you scrape, rather than squeeze, not much poison gets into the skin.”
HONEY bees have never been domesticated; man has provided boxes for them to live in but they are still wild creatures. The boxes, or hives, are only a convenience for the beekeeper to enable him to exploit the bee for honey.
Bob’s bees now produce for him a good amount of honey, an end product that can be described as a truly natural food that is made without destroying any form of life. It is also the only food that does not spoil, with edible pots having been found by archaeologists when excavating Egyptian tombs. Honey has also been used as a bodily preservative with Alexander the Great having been found to have been buried in a huge vat of honey.
The ancients described honey as ‘life giving dust’ and Hippocrates readily prescribed honey to his patients in order to clean ulcers and heal running sores. Such was the esteemed value of this product that taxes were paid in pots of honey rather than in coinage. Modern folklore suggests that if you are a hay fever sufferer and you eat the honey made within a two mile radius of your home you will quickly build up immunity to local pollens.
Bob is just one of the thousands of wise men who, over the centuries have paid their respects to the sheer wonder of this unique insect. Bees display an incredible example of the highest work ethic, cleanliness, social organisation, diligence, and intelligence. OK, they may not show strong filial ties as shown by the ‘humming’ order of a typical hive.
“The queen bee is female/hermaphrodite and invariably kills her mother and sisters. She will lay around 15,000 eggs a day. The drone is male and his job is to mate with the queen. The workers don’t mate but they do everything else: making the honeycomb, tending the new larvae, looking after the queen, cleaning the hive, gathering nectar (which is the carbohydrate supply for the hive), pollen and propolis (a resin collected from leaf buds and tree bark used to maintain and disinfect hives). With a life span that can be as short as three weeks, workers are literally worked to death.
“The queen keeps workers working, also keeping them totally disinterested in reproduction by secreting a powerful pheromone that is spread from body to body among the workers, rendering them impotent. Her big job is to lay eggs, which consume all her time and energy so she is regularly fed by a team of eight to ten worker bees, but only after she has laid the required quota of eggs. When a queen doesn’t perform well, one of her eggs is taken and prepared to take over the reign of the hive. This newly-hatched queen will destroy all other unattached queens, fight to the death with any hatched queens, destroy her mother and then go off and mate.
“Nor is there any fun in mating. As soon as the allocated 90 million sperm have successfully impregnated the queen, every drone bee who involved will end up being emasculated, having lost his sex organ in the act. They then die a rather horrible death as their abdomen bursts open.”
Bob went on to describe what happens when bees swarm: that’s when they leave the hive to go in search of pastures new if the hive is overcrowded, a regular occurrence and an act which is also steeped in folklore. “It is said that when a family member dies the bee keeper must go to the hives and tell the bees of the death or else they will immediately fly off. Another is you must never ever move hives on Good Friday. If you do, every one of the 20 to 40,000 bees in each hive will immediately perish.”
I also found out that Bob and Linda are very happily married – the bees told me, as everyone knows bees will never stay if a husband and wife regularly fight with each other.
