Beekeeping

Organic beekeeping

Bee pollination increases quality and yields in agriculture

Article published in NNA-NEWS on 4.9.2018 by NNA correspondent Cornelie Unger-Leistner. Photos: Cornelie Unger-Leistner

A successful beekeeping project on Lanzarote focuses on species-appropriate husbandry. This has many advantages for bees and humans.

What began with six bee colonies imported from Gran Canaria has developed into a success story on the Canary Island of Lanzarote: Klaus Guttenberger and his colleagues from Apicultura Lanzarote have now distributed 54 bee colonies to 20 locations on the volcanic island, much to the delight of the farmers.

PUERTO DEL CARMEN/LANZAROTE (NNA) – I meet Klaus Guttenberger, at this point still head of the WWF regional office in the Canary Islands, outside the tourist resort of Puerto del Carmen on the Finca Lomos Altos.

He has lived on Lanzarote for around 30 years. Two bee colonies from Apicultura have found a home on the edge of the finca, which belongs to the anthroposophical Centro de Terapia on Lanzarote. Its founders, Lilo and Enrique Winzer, used to live here and today tourists can rent accommodation there.

Environmental activist Guttenberger has been working on the subject of bees on Lanzarote for five years. Originally there were wild bees on the volcanic island, but – at least according to historical documents – there was no beekeeping. Today there are around 200 bee colonies on Lanzarote, most of which are kept conventionally. Guttenberger and his colleagues, however, are concerned with species-appropriate beekeeping. One of the two bee colonies, which can be found on the edge of Finca Llomos Altos, lives in the exemplary one-room hive, which is recommended for sustainable beekeeping.

The Apicultura project, in which Darlene Kist from the USA and beekeeper Betty Bonanni from Argentina are also involved, was initially set up to support organic farming on the island. “Where bees are kept, yields and quality are increased, e.g. in strawberries, tomatoes, pumpkins, zucchinis and melons. The farmers on whose land we have established the bee colonies no longer want to do without them,” reports Guttenberger. For example, the farmers in Lanzarote have always had to pollinate pumpkins by hand; this work is now done by the bee colonies.

The positive function of bee colonies kept by humans compared to wild bees is due to the fact that wild bees fly from plant to plant, whereas domesticated bees stick to one type of plant. “They don’t fly from the pear tree to the rosemary, but stay with the pears once they are there. That’s what makes their pollination so valuable for the plants.”

Special position

Klaus Guttenberger has also looked at the situation of bees in general: “Bees occupy a special position in human animal husbandry, they may be domesticated, but they are still out in the wild – that’s what makes them so vulnerable.” The worldwide bee mortality is mainly due to the conditions under which bees are kept everywhere. “It’s basically like other conventional livestock farming, where it’s all about increasing the beekeeper’s yield – and the well-being of the bees doesn’t play a role at first.”

Added to this is intensive farming, which has dramatically worsened the living conditions of bees through monocultures and the use of pesticides: “There are no more niches with wild herbs, every square meter is exploited.” All of these factors combined have led to a weakening of the bee colonies. In the USA, the term “bee disease collapse” has already been coined to describe the current situation.

The bees find better conditions in Lanzarote, as the scarcity of water on the island only allows for extensive farming. “We are not yet generating any yields, but you can already buy our honey in various organic stores on the island.” 250 kilograms of honey have been harvested so far, an average of 8 kilograms per year and colony. Apicultura is one of the pioneers of organic honey on the island. “Of course, it’s not comparable to conventional beekeeping in Europe, where 30 kilograms per colony is the norm. But bee mortality shows that here too – as in all intensive livestock farming – we are increasingly coming up against limits. That’s why our first question at Apicultura was: What do the bees want?”

Appropriate posture

With chickens and other domestic animals, it is easy to see what “cage farming” or intensive animal husbandry consists of, but with bees, a more complex understanding is required. At Mellifera e.V., the Apicultura activists learned about the conditions for species-appropriate beekeeping. Beekeepers have been developing species-appropriate beekeeping since the 1980s on the basis of Rudolf Steiner’s teachings. They began testing new methods of beekeeping at the Fischermühle training and experimental apiary.

The basic principles are the reproduction of bee colonies by swarming, the bee colonies are allowed to build their own honeycombs and no artificial breeding of queens is used. These principles were also incorporated into the guidelines for beekeeping formulated by Demeter e.V. in 1995. These principles contradict the practice of conventional beekeeping, which suppresses the swarming instinct by all means, provides the bees with one-size-fits-all walls for honeycomb construction, and in which the queens are reared by breeders and sent to the beekeepers. Animal welfare has not yet really been formulated for bees; the German Animal Welfare Act, for example, only requires them to be treated with “respect”.

The one-room hive developed by Mellifera e.V. has very large combs that have been designed for the bees to build their own combs. The entire colony is housed in a single room and is not divided into different rooms. The high comb in the one-room hive ensures that the bees are well supplied with honey. One of these beehives is located on the Finca Lomos Altos.

Will the bees on Lanzarote now be spared the dangers that threaten bees all over the world thanks to species-appropriate husbandry? “We don’t have paradise here either, there are parasites in our bees too, but the African bee variety we have here – it’s called Abjea Negra Canaria – is also more resistant.”

Differences

Even at first glance at the beehive on the edge of the finca, you can see the difference: the bees are much smaller than the European ones and much darker. They also behave differently. In these bee colonies, it is not just the guard bees that defend the entire hive, but all the bees, and they are also more vigilant and aggressive. Klaus Guttenberger always makes sure that he only works on the hives in full protective clothing, and the NNA reporter was unable to approach the hive in her shorts after Klaus Guttenberger had lifted the lid to explain the species-appropriate husbandry.

The discussion as to whether these more resistant African bee species, possibly crossed with European bees, could be a solution to the problem of bee mortality is not really sensible from Guttenberger’s point of view: “African bees are not suitable for keeping in densely populated areas. It is also more important to change the conditions for keeping bees – as well as other animals – in the interests of animal welfare.”

Klaus Guttenberger also sees the bee issue as an important zeitgeist topic. “For me, a beehive like this has a tremendously positive aura. It’s about a sensible division of labor and living together as a group, it’s also called” the bee “in German, it’s an organism that you can learn from. Who tells the bees what to do, for example? Where does the whole organization of the bee colony come from?”

In this context, he was particularly impressed by Thomas D. Seeley’s book “Bee Democracy”. In this book, the researcher, who has dedicated his entire life to bees, deciphers the language of bees and shows how their swarm intelligence arrives at joint decisions. Against this background, Klaus Guttenberger, who will soon be retiring, is looking forward to becoming even more active in beekeeping, both practically and theoretically.