Taking Wing
To
eke out a full-time living from their honeybees, about half the nation’s 2,000
commercial beekeepers pull up stakes each spring, migrating north to find more
flowers for their bees. Besides turning floral nectar into honey, these
hardworking insects also pollinate crops for farmers – for a fee. As autumn
approaches, the beekeepers pack up their hives and go south, scrambling for
pollination contracts in hot spots like California’s fertile Central Valley.
Of
the 2,000 commercial beekeepers in the United States about half migrate. This
pays off in two ways Moving north in the summer and south in the winter lets
bees work a longer blooming season, making more honey — and flowering fields in
Minnesota and every winter his family may haul the hives back to California,
where farmers will rent the bees to pollinate almond and cherry trees.
Migratory
beekeeping is nothing new. The ancient Egyptians moved clay hives, probably on
rafts, down the Nile to follow the bloom and nectar flow as it moved toward
Cairo. In the 1880s North American beekeepers experimented with the same idea,
moving bees on barges along the Mississippi and on waterways in Florida, but
their lighter, wooden hives kept falling into the water. Other keepers tried
the railroad and horse drawn wagons, but that didn’t prove practical. Not until
the 1920s when cars and trucks became affordable and roads improved, did
migratory beekeeping begin to catch on.
For
the Californian beekeeper, the pollination season begins in February. At this
time, the beehives are in particular demand by farmers who have almond groves;
they need two hives an acre. For the three-week long bloom, beekeepers can hire
out their hives for $32 each. It’s a bonanza for the bees too. Most people
consider almond honey too bitter to eat so the bees get to keep it for
themselves.
By early March it is time to move the bees. It can take up to seven nights to pack the 4,000 or so hives that a beekeeper may own. These are not moved in the middle of the day because too many of the bees would end up homeless. But at night, the hives are stacked onto wooden pallets, back-to-back in sets of four, and lifted onto a truck. It is not necessary to wear gloves or a beekeeper’s veil because the hives are not being opened and the bees should remain relatively quiet. Just in case some are still lively, bees can be pacified with a few puffs of smoke blown into each hive’s narrow entrance.
In
their new location, the beekeeper will pay the farmer to allow his bees to feed
in such places as orange groves. The honey produced here is fragrant and sweet
and can be sold by the beekeepers. To encourage the bees to money — for their
keepers. Second, beekeepers can carry their hives to farmers who need bees to
pollinate their crops. Every spring a migratory beekeeper in California may
move up to 160 million bees to produce as much money as possible during this
period, the beekeepers open the hives and stack extra boxes called supers on
top. These temporary hive extensions contain frames of empty comb for the bees
to fill with honey. In the brood chamber below, the bees will stash honey to
eat later. To prevent the queen from crawling up to the top and laying eggs, a
screen can be inserted between the brood chamber and the supers. Three weeks
later the honey can be gathered.
Foul
smelling chemicals are often used to irritate the bees and drive them down into
the hive’s bottom boxes, leaving the honey filled supers more or less bee free.
These can then be pulled off the hive. They are heavy with honey and may weigh up
to 90 pounds each. The supers are taken to a warehouse. In the extracting room,
the frames are lilted out and lowered into an “uncapper” where rotating blades
shave away the wax that covers each cell. The uncapped frames are put in a
carousel that sits on the bottom of a large stainless-steel drum. The carousel
is filled to capacity with 72 frames. A switch is flipped and the frames begin
to whirl at 300 revolutions per minute; centrifugal force throws the honey out
of the combs. Finally, the honey is poured into barrels for shipment.
After
this, approximately a quarter of the hives weakened by disease, mites, or an
ageing or dead queen, will have to be replaced. To create new colonies, a
healthy double hive, teeming with bees, can be separated into two boxes. One
half will hold the queen and a young, already mated queen can be put in the
other half, to make two hives from one. By the time the flowers bloom, the new
queens will be laying eggs, filling each hive with young worker bees. The beekeeper’s
family will then migrate with them to their summer location.
Adapted
from “America's Beekeepers:
Hives for Hire” by Alan Mairson,
National Geographic.
Questions 13 – 19
The flow chart below outlines the movements of the migratory
beekeeper as described in Reading Passage 2
Complete the flow chart
Choose your answers from the box at the bottom of the
page and write your answers in boxes 13 - 19 on your answer sheet.
BEEKEEPER
MOVEMENTS
|
Example Answer |
|
In March, beekeepers ... (13) ... for
migration the bees are generally tranquil. A little ... (15) … at night when the hives are ...
(14) ... and ... can ensure that this is the case. |
|
They transport their hives to orange groves
where farmers ... (16) ... beekeepers for placing them on their land.
Here the bees make honey. |
|
After three weeks, the supers can be taken
to a warehouse where ... (17) ... are used to remove the wax and
extract the honey from the ... (18) .... |
Questions
20 – 23
Label the
diagram below. Choose ONE OR TWO WORDS from the Reading Passage for each
answer.
Write your
answers in boxes 20 – 23 on your answer sheet.
Questions
24 – 27
Do the
following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2? In
boxes 24-27 write.
YES if the statement agrees with the information
given.
NO if the statement contradicts the
information given.
NOT GIVEN if there is no information about
this.
24
The Egyptians keep bees on the banks of the Nile.
25 First attempts at migratory beekeeping in America were
unsuccessful.
26
Bees keep honey for themselves in the bottom of the hive.