It’s always a special kind of person who takes up keeping bees

Every time I hear the word “beekeeper”, I always imagine an elderly man with a kind expression on his face and with large hands, accustomed to hard work, with bees crawling all over him without the least intent of stinging. I have never seen an angry, spiteful or drunken beekeeper.
Beekeepers are an exceptional breed of people. They come somewhere between priests, doctors and teachers.
Certain words and their origins reflect the view of Lithuanians towards bees and their keepers. To this day, bees are considered symbols of industry, cleanliness and harmony. Since pagan times, Lithuanians have retained a special reverence for bees. Bees die, just like humans; for all other creatures we use another word.

Professionals and amateurs

Beekeepers observe a tradition of meeting, always in a different part of the country, after the final removal of the honey.
Over 11,000 beekeepers across the country keep a total of over 83,000 colonies. Over 40 local beekeepers’ associations belong to the Alliance of Beekeepers, which has a total membership of 2,090 individuals. Of these, 5 to 7 per cent have large apiaries, with 50 to 200 colonies, which is the mainstay of their livelihood.
Serious professional beekeepers claim that honey is the simplest and the cheapest product from bees. The most expensive products are those with medicinal properties: beebread, pollen, propolis and venom.
Royal jelly, which is used to feed the queen, is especially valuable. It is the most expensive, not only because it is known as an elixir of youth, but also because it is the most difficult to gather and is the least plentiful product of the hive.
From an economic point of view, specialised products such as these are the most profitable. It includes breeding queens or extracting bee venom. Nevertheless, only a small percentage of beekeepers who are engaged in commercial beekeeping undertake these activities.
Places that attract me most are ones with rows of beehives set out under apple trees in an old orchard. These hives are painted in the three colours between which bees can differentiate, yellow, blue and white. Boxes kept high up in trees to capture swarms are akin to visiting cards, indicating that an amateur beekeeper lives here. These homes generally keep little sugar: they use it to feed the bees prior to the winter. Instead, they use honey to sweeten their tea, coffee and puddings.
When I tried to find out the professions of the people who tended to choose this hobby, I learned one thing: they come from every line of work. I found artists, policemen, doctors, politicians, construction workers, musicians, businesspeople and theatre directors: all sorts of professionals.
There is a saying that a love of bees is passed on through the genes. It is only natural that several generations tend to keep an apiary together.

Father and son

Although Tautvydas Bloznelis is a builder by profession, he has been a beekeeper for many years. He runs a company with his father, and works for Korys Laboratorija, which produces honey and other beekeeping products.
In a field of rape that stretches as far as the eye can see, near Kaunas at Sitkūnai, stand 30 light blue boxes. These are modern hives of a type that Lithuanians are not used to seeing. The spot is one of five where the company keeps hives.
Nothing is as suitable as rape for commercial beekeeping. No other flowering plant produces such a great quantity of honey. Korys Laboratorija was the first in Lithuania to begin using this type of Langstroth beehive this year, because of its specialised packaging machinery and other automatic equipment. The company has 127 hives in all.
“Right now, the future is being decided,” Bloznelis lays out the company plans. “If we receive support from EU funds, we’ll expand to 1,000 hives, and we’ll be the country’s largest. If we don’t get funding, we’ll stop at 200 hives.”
The largest apiaries in Lithuania have about 600 hives. Korys Laboratorija is being modernised, and is attempting to implement other innovations as well, such as using wax-coated foundation instead of the traditional foundation made entirely from wax.
“Even though we have used some of them five times, it is obvious that bees don’t like synthetic material. They make worse comb on this kind of foundation,” Bloznelis says.
He jokes how he started his career as a beekeeper at the age of six. Half-naked, he had to help his father catch a swarm with his bare hands.
Today, he has his own apiary 50 kilometres from Kaunas. He and his father harvested over 1.5 tonnes of honey this year from the 64 hives they own, a normal harvest for a good year.
Since he started working for the other company, he does not come here so often. Usually, his father Gintautas (above) is left on his own to do most of the work.

Bees are behind my good health

Even now Gintautas refers to himself as an amateur, not a professional. Once he managed the supply department for a Kaunas-based company. He has been a pensioner for the last eight years. He only returns to his flat in Kaunas for the winter. From early spring to late autumn, he lives in his remote home in a forest with his bees.
“I’ve felt drawn to bees since I was a child,” recalls Bloznelis senior.
“I remember bringing back bumblebees from the fields, and making them a nest by our barn. All day I would watch them flying out and returning home. It was my favourite pastime.”
Many years passed before he introduced his first swarm of bees to a real hive. His father-in-law, the owner of the smallholding that the family still run today, found a hollow in a tree full of bees while cutting timber in the forest. He suggested to his son-in-law that he take the bees and put them in a hive. That was how the first colony arrived in the Bloznelis’ apiary.
“Bees never attack me. That’s why I don’t wear special clothes. If one happens to sting me accidentally, I don’t worry, as the spot never swells up. I must have developed an immunity after so many years. Actually, I have two colonies of fierce bees, so I usually wear a veil over my face when I look at them.”
His house exudes the aroma of wax and honey. It has enamel pots for storing honey, as well as two extractors that stand covered against a wall. Empty honeycomb and packs of wax foundation that look like waffles are held in old-fashioned chests, as though they were a treasure, awaiting next year’s harvest.
Damaged and aged comb that is no longer suitable for bees is cut up and kept in large pots to await its turn: it will be melted down into wax. Melted wax, in the form of large round discs, will be taken away to exchange for new foundation.
Out in the yard, under a shelter, carpenter’s tools can be seen among the lumber and wood shavings. The father and son make all their hives themselves.
“Here, the jobs just come one after the other. All of them are pleasant, interesting and meaningful. The best time is when my wife works here at weekends, and our children and grandchildren come.
“Still, I like it best when I’m alone with my bees. Better than I feel in the city without a job, that’s hard. When I sit there in Kaunas in the winter, it’s so boring. It’s better if I can bring along some odd job to do, like cutting propolis off frames. Then my wife gets angry with me for making a mess all over the floor.”
During the summer, though, the work of a beekeeper is never done. Besides harvesting the honey, every hive has to be checked to make sure there is enough food for the larvae to feed on and that the bees are not starving after some frames of honey have been removed. Swarms that have been caught need tending.
Beekeepers do not disturb the comb in the brood box during the summer. The honey is taken from supers.
The honey that is gathered in them depends on the flowers out at the time. Once the dandelions have flowered, the dandelion honey is removed. The honey in the lower frames, which has accumulated all summer, is only harvested in the autumn.
“To me, honey from various different plants tastes best. The better the honey is, the faster it crystallises. When we extract dandelion honey in the springtime, it is so translucent that the bottom of a full churn can be seen,” the elder Bloznelis says.
The family themselves eat a great deal of honey. But they sell most of it at the open-air farmers’ market in Kaunas. The wife does the selling; that’s her job every other week.
“I eat honey every day. My breakfast is always the same: a couple of slices of white bread, some cottage cheese, a cup of coffee, and a lot of honey.
“Honey and bees are the reason for my good health. I’m seventy-two years old and I feel absolutely healthy, and have enough energy to do all my work. There was a time when my joints ached. Now I’ve even forgotten about them.
“You might always squeeze some little bee in the course of your work, and some angry bee might sting you. But the venom is the best medicine of all. I always have an alcohol-based solution of propolis around. If I get a bruise or something, I rub it on, and it goes away.”
By October, the apiary is ready for winter. The bees have been fed sugar syrup. All the unnecessary frames are removed, and the hive is insulated from within by packing it with small pillows. That’s how the bees will spend their winter, until the warmth of the spring sun brings out the first flowers rich with nectar.