Bee man
James started beekeeping last year after wanting to find a new skill following lockdown and he fell in love with it - over the past year he has seen success with his hives and he has started raising money for charity through the honey he sells.
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NewsTranscript
00:00So my name is James and I'm the founder of the charity Beekeeping for Hope and
00:04it's a charity which was established in February this year. So what we do is we
00:09get honey from our dedicated hives and the honey from that hive goes to a cause.
00:14Like we have a hive dedicated to the Green Orphanage, the Green Light
00:19Foundation Orphanage in Uganda. So our honey sells from there, goes straight to
00:24them. We have another hive dedicated to Hope 4 in Ukraine and Moldova and we
00:30have one dedicated to the Portsmouth community. So when I'm out and about,
00:33quite rare, but when I'm out and about I'll take some jars with me and if I see people
00:37who need some honey I'll just hand them some jars. So I started last May with one
00:43beehive which is a caught swarm. Our queen was called Phoenix so she was a
00:472000 and it grew from there really. I got given a beehive by another beekeeper
00:52and then I caught my own swarm. I put a bait box out, some frames in it and bees
00:57went in and I caught another colony and then from there it just built up really. I got sent
01:02queens from other people, other beekeepers as well. So now in the
01:07winter I had seven colonies all together and now I've got ten. I could have had
01:12more but a few of them swarmed off and I haven't got much room. I do treat them
01:17like a family. As you know we name all our queens so all our queens have got
01:21individual names, they've all got individual personalities. Some are a bit
01:24skitty, some are really calm and gentle. It's like looking after, I say one
01:31hive is about 30,000 bees so 30,000 children mixed of girls, boys and their
01:35queen. So when a bee comes out of a cell the first job the bee does is to
01:41clean her cell so the queen can lay a fresh egg in there. Then that bee is a
01:46nurse bee, they've got no wing muscles so they can't flap, they can't fly, it's just
01:50folded behind their back and they go around and do cleaning jobs around the
01:53hive and as they get older they have different jobs so they can be a queen
01:58attendant where they'll circle the queen to make sure she's laying well, to feed
02:02her, to water her and again you've got the ranks, you become a forager bee. In your
02:07last few days where you can go out and you forage water, pollen or sap from a
02:12tree to make the bee glue and you've got guard bee rolls, you've got undertaker bee
02:17rolls, pheromone bees who release pheromone to tell the bees where they are,
02:22scout bees who mark areas for areas of interest. They've got basic brains but
02:28they can picture, they can make pictures of your face, the contours, the smell of
02:32me, the smell of my smoker so they know I'm coming. I've had places before where
02:37the bees know me so they're fine but when something else comes with me, so you
02:41were lucky, they're very interested in that person so they will investigate. I
02:47would like, my dream is to have my own bit of land with a teaching hut in the
02:53back, beehives all around outside then inside of course my house and my family
02:57where we can have chickens and everything and then next year we'll start extracting
03:01honey again and getting children in for lessons and teachings. Yeah so if you
03:06want to speak to me or see me on the 26th and 27th of this month so July
03:12I'm down at the Staggering Good Beer Festival for Hive Aid where
03:18the whole day, the whole weekend so it will be based on honeybees, you can drink
03:22mead, there'll be lots of activities. I'll be there with all my stuff and my
03:27equipment and my kit so you can come and talk to me and I'll be raising some
03:31money to get two brand new beehives so again to fund more causes so hopefully
03:39I'll see you there.