Apiculture Author:-G. keerthana

Apiculture:

                Article by:Gundagani.keerthana

Bee keeping care and management of colonies of honeybees. They are kept for their honey and other products or their services as pollinators of fruit and vegetable blossoms or as a hobby. 

 

           

• In antiquity people knew that bees produce delicious honey, that they sting, and that they increase their numbers by swarming.

• By the 17th century they had learned the value of smoke in controlling them and had developed the screen veil as protection against stings.

• These included the mystery of the queen bee as the mother of nearly all the occupants of the hive, her curious mating technique, parthenogenetic development, the movable frame hives, and the fact that bees rear a new queen if the old one disappears.

• Development of the wax-comb foundation, the starter comb on which bees build straight, easily handled combs, and the discovery that honey can be centrifuged or extracted from them and the combs reused, paved the way for large-scale honey production and modern commercial beekeeping.

 Nectar:

• Honeybees collect nectar, a sugary solution, from nectaries in blossoms and sometimes from nectaries on the leaves or stems of plants. 

• Nectar may consist of 50 to 80 percent water, but when the bees convert it into honey it will contain only about 16 to 18 percent water.

  Honey dew:

• Sometimes they collect honeydew, an exudate from certain plant-sucking insects, and store it as honey. The primary carbohydrate diet of bees is honey.  

    Pollen:

• They also collect pollen, the dustlike male element, from the anthers of flowers.

• Pollen provides the essential proteins necessary for the rearing of young bees.

• In the act of collecting nectar and pollen to provision the nest, the bees pollinate the flowers they visit.

 

• Honeybees also collect propolis, a resinous material from buds of trees, for sealing cracks in the hive or for covering foreign objects in the hive that they cannot remove. 

Beekeeping equipment:

                    The smoker quell the bees; a veil to protect the face; gloves for the novice or the person sensitive to stings; a blunt steel blade called a hive tool, for separating the frames and other hive parts for examination; the uncapping knife, for opening the cells of honey; and the extractor, for centrifuging the honey from the cells.

Pollination:

• The greatest value of bees is in their service as pollinators. 

• The average colony of bees is worth from 20 to 40 times as much in the pollination of crops as it is in the production of honey.

• Bees are also valuable in the pollination of some forest and range plants that produce seeds on which birds and other wildlife feed.

• When bees are used in the pollination of crops, the beekeeper places the colonies within or adjacent to the field to be pollinated.

• Two colonies per acre are recommended for almond orchards and about one colony per acre in apple orchards.

Advantages of beekeeping as an income generation activity:

• Bee keeping requires less time, money and infrastructure investments.

• Honey and beeswax can be produced from an area of little agricultural value.

• The Honey bee does not compete for resources with any other agricultural enterprise.

• Beekeeping can be initiated by individuals or groups.

• The market potential for honey and wax is high.

Importance of beekeeping :

It is important in our live as honeybees provide honey, which is a highly nutritive substance and beeswax is used in many industries. Honeybees also pollinate flowers of some very important plants like sunflower, apple, pear.