Heather beekeeping
The heather beekeeping was a special type of beekeeping that beekeepers in the Lüneburg Heath practiced intensively from the Middle Ages until the 19th century and which is very rare today. It is also known as Lüneburg swarm beekeeping , Lüneburg Heath beekeeping or Lüneburg basket beekeeping . Typical characteristics were bee dwellings made of woven straw baskets, the use of the heather blossom , frequent migration of worthwhile costumes and the enormous increase in bee colonies through swarms . The heather beekeeping was an important part of the heather farming economy .
Operating mode
The heather beekeeping is a special type of beekeeping for the production of heather honey . It is a traveling swarm beekeeping where the beekeepers only let a small number of bee colonies overwinter. In spring they multiply the number of colonies by swarms of bees , although numbers of several hundred colonies were not unusual in the past. Through this selection for early and frequently swarming bees, the heather bee has developed over the centuries within the heather areas as an extremely swarming and robust ecotype of the dark European bee .
The bee fences , which were widespread at the time, provided enough space for installation . A basket woven from straw, the Lüneburger Stülper , and from the mid-1920s also the Kanitz basket was used as a beehive . Since there was usually not enough food to be found there for the many bee colonies concentrated in one place, heather beekeepers had to migrate to rewarding nectar springs with the bees . The many new bee colonies that were formed in spring from swarms of bees collected honey on the blooming heather in late summer, usually in August and September. After the honey harvest, the surplus bee colonies were either killed by sulphurisation with sulfur dioxide or removed from their baskets and sold as naked heather colonies without combs.
history
The historical basket or heather beekeeping produced honey and beeswax in the Lüneburg Heath for centuries . Heather honey was a sought-after commodity in the Middle Ages. Beekeeping was widespread in the core areas of the former heather, so that a bee fence was part of almost every farm. The farmers employed special beekeepers for this purpose. Celle in the southern heath emerged as a large trading center for the heather honey obtained . There was a professional beekeeping here as early as the 16th century. The decline began in the second half of the 19th century due to various factors that led to the decline of heather areas. As a result of the land consolidation , there were no more common areas with their wide range of nectar. The introduction of mineral fertilizers enabled better harvests on heather soils and therefore heather areas were converted into arable land. Bog soils with buckwheat cultivation were converted into meadows for livestock farming. In addition, there was extensive afforestation of heather areas with fast-growing pines .
present
Today there is only a very small number of beekeepers in the Lüneburg Heath that keep bees in the historical manner. Is produced here as well as earlier comb honey , which is a specialty today because of its rarity. Disc honey is a honeycomb filled with honey.
Even today, heather areas are popular with beekeepers for bee colonies to obtain heather honey. Most of the time, modern magazine hives are used instead of the traditional beehives. The exploitation of the heather is stressful for the bee colonies nowadays, as they are already worked off by collecting the spring and summer during the heather bloom in August. In contrast, the bee colonies in traditional heather beekeeping used these costumes only to build up the population and the peak of the population development was specifically set at the time of the heather bloom. The bees were then sold or killed as naked heather colonies without combs. In today's year-round beekeeping, it is better for bee colonies to invest their energy in producing long-lived winter bees in August instead of collecting honey. In addition, when the heather is in bloom, bees can be lost due to being caught in spider webs if there is no grazing with heather sheep .
literature
- Hans-Günther Brockmann: Device of basket beekeepers in the Lüneburg Heath , Hildesheim, 2005, ISBN 3-8067-8507-4
- Georg Heinrich Lehzen: The main pieces from the operation of the Lüneburg beekeeping , 165 pages, first edition 1880, new edition by Heinrich Holtermann GmbH & Co. KG
- Friedrich Trauegott Schmidt: Beekeeping in Baskets, or Lower Saxon Bee Father , Leipzig: Crusius, 1768, digitized copy as PDF file ( Memento from October 2, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
Web links
- The old heather bee - Apis mellifera mellifera lehzenii
- Bieneninstitut Celle : Profile heather honey (PDF file; 130 kB)
- Video series: Heideimkerei (8 parts, 1982–1987) published by the Institute for Scientific Film . Provided in the AV portal of the technical information library .