Bees

Bees here means the colony itself, the living population of honey bees, rather than the box it occupies. A colony feeds on flowers already growing within reach, so it adds to a holding without taking from it: it needs no productive ground, and hives can stand in trees, on waste ground or on a flat roof. What comes back is honey, and with it beeswax, pollen, propolis and royal jelly. Turning those into candles or ointments pays considerably better than selling them raw.

What a colony asks for is short: bees, a place to keep them, water, sun and flowers. The flowers are the part that needs thought, because bees need them without a break rather than in one flush. The gap between one flowering and the next is called a dearth, and a dearth is when a colony starves or turns to robbing. Planting so that something is always in bloom is the pairing that matters most. The pollination a colony gives back is real but hard to measure, so it is a poor thing to build a budget on. And keeping hives is not the same as looking after wild pollinators: most wild bees travel less than about 180 m (200 yards) from the nest and roughly two in three nest in the ground, so they need undisturbed soil and rough habitat nearby rather than a hive.

A colony is livestock and runs on a calendar rather than a routine. Through the build-up of the first main bloom it wants opening at least every fortnight, because a crowded hive swarms and takes half its population with it. Varroa, a parasitic mite, is the standing threat. It multiplies while young bees are being raised, and must be dealt with before the long-lived bees that carry the colony through the cold are reared - those live months where the rest live weeks, so damage to them cannot be made up. Stores run lowest just as laying restarts, so feeding at that point is a hard sugar rather than syrup, which bees cannot take when chilled.