Lovely.
Tasty.
Looking nice and healthy.
That's great.
Wow, that's nice.
That's nice.
That's very nice and lovely, lovely, lovely.
We're not going to find bees this strong without some sort of food at this time of the year.
We're at the beginning of June now, end of May.
So we're right in the middle of winter basically.
You can hear them but you can't see any.
Seems like a bit of a challenging task but most of them are just high up there.
See if we can get it in here.
I think one would most possibly get better at it more often you do it.
Oh, that was close.
I was born and grew up in a rural village.
35 kilometers or so east of Polyquan.
You know growing up in the rural areas.
All that we knew, me, my friends and other people around is that bees were not good.
You know if you come across bees it's either you make a run for it
or you just make sure that you kill it before it stings you.
And today, yeah, I am actually being involved in such important and critical research
that has to do with these honeybees.
We grew up in the mountains, lots of lovely praetiers around
and then lots of smaller little nondescript bushes that we often miss
when we're walking past little pink flowers and purple flowers
and they all contribute to a diversity in the bee's diet.
And it's unique vegetation to the cape so the two have evolved together.
Faneboss is essential to the survival of our cape bee, especially with other forage
being knocked down the way they're taking it out.
Most beekeepers who've got access to faneboss or who know what they're doing
will try to use faneboss.
Lovely, this is a certain new queen in this hive.
You can see they've caped black bees so they're very black, they caped bees.
Lots of different colors of pollen, very nice.
We catch bees in these bottles and there's a chemical ethyl acetate
which subdues the bees and puts them to sleep so that we can handle them afterwards.
Although you call it a killing bottle, I wouldn't like to call it a killing bottle.
I'd like to call it a sacrificing bottle.
It just doesn't sound good when you kill things that you work on, you love and so on.
Pick up the bee with a tweezer and then hold it between thumb and forefinger
with its lower side pointing upwards and then that exposes the honey sack.
Does South Africa need more research into such forage resources?
And the answer is absolutely yes.
It's coming, wonderful.
This is the honey stomach that I've just pulled out from the abdomen of the bee.
I'll give you the three here.
I agree.
There are several factors that can be considered threats to our honey bees
mostly being the likes of pesticide use, diseases,
and we also have the stress that these bees encounter
when beekeepers work them for pollinating the crops
and also the other one being the loss of forage.
And in this instance, forage is something that we can do something about.
Martin Johansmeyer has documented certain forage across the country.
Pollen size, pellet size.
But on a broader spectrum, on a more thorough investigation into this type of forage resources,
there is still a lot of work that needs to be done.
And my research is a baseline for more research to come in.
And there you have your sample of nectar.
Sugar concentration is 23.
Using techniques such as these, we can evaluate the kind of forage that is good
and is important for our honey bees.
And what we can do in terms of looking at ways to look after such forage
or look at ways in which we can increase such forage
or even protecting such forage.
How many plant species I've processed with this method?
About 400.
But that is just a small part of our incredible flora that we have in South Africa.
There's still much to be done to be found out.
These bees are not that cross, otherwise I wouldn't be able to do that with them.
Give me your hand here, put your hand here.
Carlos, put your hand out here.
Here we go, I'll make you into a beekeeper yet.
Isn't it amazing that you can hold bees like that?
And they don't sting.
I think it's very important to know what's doing this to the bees.
Look how healthy they are, that's the important thing.
What is doing this?
I know what's doing this, it's a fainboss.
They're meant to be together.
You just look at the results when you're getting full boxes of bees like this
and they're just happy, happy and healthy.
I'm looking out here to see some nice plants starting to flower since it's early spring and so on.
Nice breeze outside and it's a good day.
This is basically my office space where everything happens.
All the documents come in through here.
You can see every nice little piece here.
When one looks at South Africa's honey bee population, we're quite lucky.
We've got quite a good gene pool.
The same honey bees that are managed by the beekeepers are the same honey bees
that we find within our natural ecosystem and landscape.
It comes to a point where we need to maintain this.
It's a very broad, demanding research
because when you're looking into the forest resources that these honey bees use,
it's something that one can do in a lifetime.
Hundreds and thousands of plants out there
and there's just no way that one can follow each and every little bee out there
and try and find out what it's collecting and from which plant it's collecting.
Given the magnitude of the amount of information that one would have needed to collect,
I thought the first point would be to turn to our local beekeepers.
Some of them will even tell you which plants are good for bees and which ones are not.
So that's the kind of critical information that I looked
and I thought it would be good to acquire from these guys.
Coming up with a questionnaire was the very first and possibly the best option
because there are so many of them close to about 1,400 or so on across the country.
It was going to be a huge task to visit each and every one of them.
We're in spring now.
Just got through a cold, wet winter and we're back with the bees
after they've had their break from the beekeeper in the feinbos.
The farmer's trees are starting to flower being spring
and they need something to come and pollinate their trees
of which honey bees are one of the easiest to control.
I'm going to prep this hive for pollination
because I think they're plenty strong enough.
They've got five frames of brood.
Here's the queen.
The queen is hoping to hide from us.
The queen is the egg factory.
She makes sure that these colonies survive by laying eggs which turn into adult bees.
Before they're any good for pollination, they have to be a certain strength
so this little queen needs to lay lots of eggs.
The bees' role is very important in modern-day world
as far as food security goes.
Unfortunately, we have to manipulate them to be able to take
unnaturally large numbers of beehives into orchards.
Moving bees is hard on the bees.
We're still losing 20%, maybe 25% of our swarms each year.
Losses happen as in all businesses
but we're obviously trying to look after the bees
and be shepherds of the bees, not just abuse them and use them.
These beekeepers, you know, they've been keeping bees for a long time.
They are managing them so they are in a way custodians
and some of these guys have been keeping bees for more than 40 to 50 years.
That makes them very knowledgeable in terms of the forage resources
that these honeybees use.
And that is very critical and important in indigenous knowledge.
With forage, as far as forage goes, we need diversity.
We don't want to always be reliant on monoculture like this canola here.
So we need to have canola, we need to have feinbos,
we need to have wild spring flowers, we need to have eucalyptus,
we need a bit of everything, I think, to make it all happen
and to keep the bees healthy.
I think the bees need diversity in their diets.
This farm takes about 1,200 hives, one of our bigger farms.
Oh man, those bees are working nicely.
So please, those are beautiful, strong hives.
Those are not just any hives, those are pollination bees and special bees.
What is most important for the research as a whole
is that I establish a trust relationship with these beekeepers.
Thanks for making time to meet me so we can chat
and you can tell me more about your bees
and what we're doing in this nice beautiful orchard in terms of pollination.
The farmers have planted the trees so intensively
that they need a huge number of pollinators at one time
and the easiest, most reliable way to control that is to bring in bee hives.
According to the research, the bees improve the quantity three times.
Bee health is the huge consideration,
especially with a lot of countries having problems with their bees.
Getting the right diet, getting them stronger, built up
and making sure that they are eating well, it's quite a constraint.
Not just getting monoculture or getting supplementary feeding,
that's a short-term fix. It's not a long-term fix for bees.
This is the bee factory.
This is where it all happens.
That is all brewed over here,
which means that they had to feed that brewed with pollen
and we've got pollen around the edges.
Have a look at the diversity of the colours here in the pollen.
So that is what contributes to their healthiness,
is to have diversity in their protein.
That's their protein, right?
There we go. Check that out. There's lovely honey.
There's the little eggs, so the queen laid those eggs.
They hatched after three days into a little larva.
They've been feeding that larva.
The larva get bigger and bigger until you get these white ones here.
And then when they get to that size, they go into a cocoon.
And that's where they change from a larva into a bee.
Here we go. Here's a nice little plum coming here.
There we go. That's all plums.
It's amazing to see the results of the bees.
We just see the bees working the flowers all the time.
And that's actually the more important is that they get that.
World population is growing very fast.
And it needs to be fed.
The farmers are going to be planting more and more trees
and vegetables and things to supply the demand.
So we're going to have to supply bees.
We're going to probably have to have more and more bee hives.
And we can't do it at present because we don't have enough forage.
We don't have enough place to keep the bees alive for the rest of the year
to bring them in for pollination.
We're trying to get the information from you guys.
You know what they rely on. You know what their daily requirements are.
So we need to put those things together.
We need to put them together. We need to document them.
We need to assess them.
We need to make that information meaningful.
I've always liked to help the researchers.
And it will be fantastic after all your hard work
for it to be implemented into planting programs.
In most instances we don't get to think and realise how the food we eat gets to us.
This is a more complex system than we think.
Every little thing depends on the other.
And it is very important that we as the beneficiaries at the end of the line
start thinking about such things.
We can sit back and relax and think that things will continue to be the way they are.
The first step is ensuring that these honeybees have good nutrition
and that's one critical point to focus on.
Seen some nice queen cells, colourful brood,
signs of good forage, you know, healthy bees,
got a nice first sting.
Our daily activities, they cross paths with the paths of this insect's lives.
And I think it's very important that the public is aware of the importance of such pollinators,
what they benefit from them and what they can do in helping them.
There's always something that you can do.
Not just looking after honeybees, but our natural environment
and the landscape and ecosystems as a whole.
