Nature Features

Chris Coulson is a beekeeper in Hull. He and his wife Patricia have been keeping bees for over 30 years.

The couple have three hives which they keep at the back of their garden on Marlborough Avenue. The Coulsons are one of a few in the region who are successfully keeping bees in the urban environment.

They also have their own honey production facility where the extraction and bottling is all done at home using a motorised cylinder. And the product line doesn't stop there. The remaining beeswax is turned into furniture polish, hand and face creams, propolis, which is an antiseptic remedy and mead, an alcoholic drink. No wax is left to waste.

Hobbyist beekeepers Chris and Patricia Coulson

“Wax polish was the obvious thing to start with.” said Chris.

“Then you go on to more complicated things like hand creams, of which there are an enormous variety. Then you have propolis left over and in the end you think ‘I may as well extract it’ because you are all the time trying to cover the cost of the hobby.”

Every year the couple open their garden to the public during the annual Avenues Open Gardens event in the summer. This is when the couple sell most of their bee products.

“When we open our garden to the public, a lot of people come to see our beekeeping display that we do because you can watch the bees quite easily through the garage windows with absolute safety.

“We're always interested in youngsters watching because they aren't taking it up like they used to and we're always trying to encourage youngsters in our organisation, which is the Beverley Beekeepers’ Association, to come along and learn how to bee-keep.”

Honey made from urban bees has its own distinct taste and aroma which can change each season, as Chris explains:

“Initially it’s an overpowering perfume-flavour that you get from the honey and that varies from year to year depending on what [plants] people are growing. Compared to rural honey where the honey is collected from mono crops such as oilseed rape, you probably get very samey tasting honey for a number of years because farmers grow the same crops.”

“There were a number of years where we had a lime flavour in it because there were large lime trees in the Avenues, so you got this slightly distinctive flavour in our honey. But the council cut down these big trees so this taste has disappeared.”

Recently, there has been a growing concern over the rate at which the honey bee population is declining. Five years ago just six percent of honey bee colonies died out in the winter. Last winter the figure has soared to between 25% and 33%. The main reason for this decline is disease.

The British Bee Keeping Association is warning that if bee colonies die at a much faster rate the whole bee keeping industry could collapse.

The Coulson's bee hives

“For various reasons varroa is one pest that we've got and that was introduced into Europe in the 1970s by mistake by bee scientists, and that’s rampant now.” said Chris. “We've got to treat it to keep the disease down in the colony otherwise the colony will die out.

“We lost a colony, so we lost a third of our bees last year and we've had trouble with one of the colonies which seem to become queen less."

Chris continued: “Beekeeping is under pressure and given the fact that a third of the food we eat is due to pollinating insects, particularly honey bees, then it doesn't bode very well for crops.

“Of course, ours fertilise things round the Avenues like apples and pears and everything else so people benefit, we hope, from our bees.”