Bees sharing has become a prospering fact today, as honey bee colonies can now be rented with their beekeepers.
In Germany, a new concept flourished three years ago in the form of a trade launched by businessman and amateur beekeeper Dieter Schimanski from Bremen.
Schimanski, who grew up with bees thanks to his father's passion for beekeeping, says: “I want to foster a new kind of beekeeping that isn't dependent on the honey yield but makes beekeepers attractive again.”
Along with the new similar projects like “BeeSharing” in Hamburg, Schimanski rents out colonies of 40,000 to 60,000 bees through his company, which started out as "a bit of fun”.
The service's steady growth should not come as a surprise: honey bee populations are in decline worldwide, with dire consequences for the environment and agriculture. Today, 150 of Bee-Rent's colonies are at work at 70 locations in Germany. Schimanski's team provides their wooden hives and collect their honey, the German news agency reported.
Customers receive their honey in small jars adorned with specially designed labels. About 870,000 separate bee colonies buzz from flower to flower in Germany, according to the German Beekeeping Association. The trend is growing because more city dwellers are also trying beekeeping, although less than 1% of them do it for a living.
Bees do not only provide the delicious honey we put on our breakfast bread. Peter Maske, the association's president, says: “Bee farming benefits nature and agriculture far beyond honey production.”
Without bees, farmers would harvest much fewer apples, cherries or pumpkins. Experts of agricultural economy at the University of Hohenheim calculated the huge economic importance of honey bee in 2017, and found that the added value of pollination is estimated at 1.6 billion euro yearly, 13 times higher than the production of honey and its wax.
In fact, without bee pollination, crop yields in Germany would be 41% lower on average, according to a study. But because beekeepers with colonies are distributed unevenly, there are regional pollination bottlenecks. Farmers solve the problem by paying beekeepers to come to them, as has been the practice for years in the US.
However, beekeeper association head Maske sees only limited value in such projects, which he says would not be necessary if there were enough wild honey bees.
He also says farmers have a duty to plant more flowers and plants like buckwheat and camelina, along field edges so that bees can naturally find enough food.
