How I got into Bees

I have been thinking long and hard about the topic of my first ever post on my personal website, long enough to the point I’ve also contemplated when I should actually begin releasing content. Knowing that World Bee Day is coming up (celebrated on the 20th of May every year), I figured that I would explain to you all how it all started: how I got into bees.

It all began back when I was still studying for my bachelors degree at Imperial College London. I had joined a student-led society that did gardening as group activities, and indeed they had a quaint but decently-sized allotment in the middle of the South Kensington campus. Within this little retreat from the bustling Exhibition Road were two bee hives, kept and maintained by the society’s own committee members. I had a lot of fun in every gardening session I joined, and I even got a chance to attend a ‘hive tour’ and saw the inside of a hive for the first time.

And then the pandemic hit. Suddenly I was back in my home country, thousands of miles away from the campus where I would usually attend classes. The entire summer I (and many others I’m sure) had spent it all cooped indoors, while the little pollinators continued on with their business during the most productive time of the year. Though I missed the peak season to see the bees in action, I knew I would get another chance as I had decided to return to London for the next academic year. After settling back in London, I reached out to the society committee.

Good news, the bees were still alive and kicking in the garden! Bad news, the former head apiarist couldn’t come back to London due to travel restrictions. The society held an election for new committee members, and in a moment of ‘why not’ I pitched in my own application for the head apiarist role. Soon after I was told I would be the new head apiarist for the society.

There’s just one catch: I knew nothing about beekeeping.

I had zero beekeeping experience in my life, no one else in the committe knew much about beekeeping either. And with social distancing measures I couldn’t really ask for a more experienced beekeeper to give me a hands-on tour. All I had to my disposal was a shed full of all the necessary beekeeping equipment: the suit, the smoker, the hive tool and more. It was up to me to figure out how to make use of these equipment and do the things a beekeeper usually does. With no other options, I had to become self-taught.

It started out simple enough: searching terms like “How to keep bees” into Google and Youtube to get the basic idea of what the hobby is all about. Over time I got more acquainted with the more technical details of beekeeping such as overwintering, swarming and integrated pest management. More importantly I got to learn about the biology of honeybees on a level I had never reached before, and I came to appreciate the complex behaviours of these eusocial insects. Before long, my mind was deeply entrenched in the beekeeping rabbit hole, and the bug-nerd side of me only grew stronger.

I wasn’t really afraid of bees to begin with, but putting on the bee suit definitely helped my confidence! Soon enough I was carrying out my own inspections on both bee hives in the garden, having learnt to distinguish the queen from the workers and recognise signs that a colony is about to swarm. And as lockdown restrictions eased and gardening sessions resumed, I held my own hive tour with other society members, all the while sharing a variety of niche yet fascinating facts about honeybees. There were indeed ups and downs during my beekeeping journey, some of which I may explore in more detail in future blogs!

Becoming head apiarist was undeniably one of the strongest highlights of my time at Imperial: The gratification of learning a new hobby from scratch, knowing all the bewildering facts about honeybees and similar pollinators, and more importantly being able to share my passion with other people. Beekeeping as a hobby had such a tremendous positive impact on my personhood that I believe it’s one of the main motivations why I’m doing a PhD on Bumblebees - and more than just because I learned to love bees!