Slides That Follow Your Voice: Greek Accent Beekeeping Workshop

Slide 1: One Warm Animal

0:17Good morning, and welcome to the first of four Saturdays. Before anything else, three rules, and then you can ask me anything. One, nobody opens a hive today. Two, nobody opens a hive next Saturday either. Three, the person who asks when we open a hive is making coffee for the group. No? Okay. You will laugh later. With the bees.

Slide 2: Three rules

0:44We will open a hive on the third Saturday, when you know what you are looking at, and not before, because bees are patient and you are not.

0:53My name is Kostas. I have kept bees for twenty-three years, on the hill behind the school, and I currently have thirty-nine, no, forty-one hives, which is eleven more than my wife believes I have, so if you meet her, the number is thirty. [chuckles] She counts them from the terrace, with binoculars, every spring. Twenty years. She has never once got the right number, because I put the new ones behind the cypress trees, and I am telling you this because none of you know her. Where was I. The hive. Yes.

Slide 3: The hill behind the school: 41 hives

1:29Let me tell you what a hive actually is, because most people think it is a box of bees, and it is not. It is one animal, okay? A colony in summer has about forty thousand to sixty thousand bees, one queen, a few hundred drones, and the rest are workers, all female, all sisters, and every one of them will live about six weeks, except the queen, who will live three or four years and lay around one thousand five hundred eggs a day in May. Two thousand, some books say. On a good day. It depends on the queen.

Slide 4: Not a box of bees: one animal

2:06The hive thinks as a whole. It keeps the brood at thirty-five degrees whether it is snowing or forty outside, by shivering or by fanning, and if you understand that one fact, that the hive is a single warm body that you are about to open, you will handle it with the right amount of Uh... respect.

Slide 5: The hive thinks as a whole

2:28The box. We use the standard frame hive, ten frames in the brood box, one or two boxes above for honey. The frames come out one by one, which is the whole invention, really, because before that you had to destroy the hive to look inside it.

Slide 6: The box: the standard frame hive

2:47Smoke, the smoker, okay, smoke. Smoke. You will see me use a smoker, and you will want to know why. Not to calm them, not really. Smoke makes them think the forest is burning, so they go to the honey and fill up, in case they have to leave, and a bee with a full belly is a bee that is not thinking about you.

Slide 7: Smoke

3:10It also covers the alarm scent, which is the smell of bananas, and which is why you never eat a banana near a hive, and yes, somebody always does, somebody always does, and we will talk about that person on the third Saturday. [laughs]

3:26Stings. You will be stung. I was stung four times on Thursday, and I am standing here. The sting hurts for about two minutes, and most people's body learns, over a season, to react less.

Slide 8: Stings

3:42If you have ever had a serious reaction to a sting, you tell me now, privately, and we talk about whether this is the course for you, and I say that with love, because this is not a hobby that forgives surprises. [sighs]

3:59The year. The year begins in February when the almond blooms. The bees build up in March and April, they may swarm in May if you are not paying attention, and the honey comes in June and July, which is thyme on these hills, and then there is a long quiet summer, a small autumn flow from the uh, the carob, and a winter where you leave them alone and worry.

Slide 9: The year

4:24Your first jar, if you do everything right, comes next June. It will be about two kilos. It will be the best thing you have ever tasted, and it will have cost you roughly four hundred euros a kilo. My first jar was in two thousand and two. I still have the jar. Empty, obviously. When a season goes badly I take it down and look at it, and I remember that I thought this would be easy. That is all. It is a jar.

Slide 10: Your first jar: roughly 400 euros a kilo

4:56Coffee is at the back. Yannis, since you asked about opening the hive during the introduction, you are making it. Milk is in the fridge. Yannis, the bees can smell fear, so, be confident with the spoon.