NewsBiscuit

Britain is facing a major shortage of bee hives as modern, younger bees are choosing to reject traditional communal living and are opting instead for the freedom and independence that comes from living on their own.

‘It’s been getting worse every year’ said bee-keeper Mike Chatterton from Devon, who has been keeping bees for forty years. ‘In the old days, you’d put a hive in your back garden and around thirty thousand busy-busy bees would soon settle in it. Now they’ve decided they’d like things a little quieter. It only takes one bee to move in, and then another one comes along and thinks, ‘Oh, I don’t want to move in there – there’s another bee already in there’.’

Modern hive construction has attempted to accommodate the social change in the living choices of bees, with high rise ‘bee flats’ replacing the crowded, shared honeycomb that bees have endured down the centuries, but even these are now being rejected; ‘The bees don’t just want their own little hive, they want a balcony, a little garden and a bit of personal space to fly around in.’

Many bees continue to produce honey in the smaller personalised hives, but the extraction process is inefficient and time consuming. ‘Though not all bees are contented to be told that all they are going to do is produce honey for the rest of their lives’ explains Mike Chatterton. ‘Some of the younger ones want a gap year, or to travel. Oh and when they come back they’ve decided they want to be a wasp.’

newsbiscuit

Posted: Jan 5th, 2008 by NewsBiscuit