BEES The key to food security?
It is mid-morning in late spring and you can smell fynbos and pine resin on the cool breeze. White clouds billow above the Western Cape’s Overberg region, yet the sunlight manages to pierce through and illuminate patches of the landscape. The only sound you hear is a whisper of wind through the brush as Chris Nicklin cuts a strip of hessian from a sack, lights it with a match and stuffs it into a bee smoker. Next he climbs into a white overall, pulls a veil over his head and puts on a pair of gloves. “Right, let’s have a look,” he says as he lifts the lid of a beehive.
Although a collective buzz erupts from the hive as Chris pumps a puff of smoke over the colony of bees, the insects seem largely unfazed by the intrusion into their home. Bees crawl over his hands with mild interest as he pulls out and inspects a frame laden with golden goodness. “It is still a cool time of day, which makes them more docile,” Chris says. “It’s the total opposite when you work with them in the canola fields. They are a lot more energetic there and you really need to keep your wits about you.”
Chris has had a busy spring season, moving hundreds of beehives back and forth across the province in a wide arc between Wellington and his 100 ha farm near Napier. He is part of a growing number of commercial bee farmers focusing almost entirely on the pollination of food crops, a service now more in demand than ever before. It
