Name: Meet the beekeeper at Battle Abbey!
Uploaded: 2022-08-24T17:36:49.000Z
Duration: 5 min 22 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hi. I'm Madeleine, and I'm here at Battle Abbey in East Sussex.

Which is where William the Conqueror, beat King Harold at the Battle of Hastings,

in 1066. And now more than 950 years later.

I'm going to talk to Graham the head beekeeper to find out more

Bee, along with many other insects, are used for pollination.

The beekeepers job is to look after the hive. Make sure they're safe.

Make sure there is no disease in the hive.

Honey is collected usually at the end of June.

July, when the bees have got an excess of honey.

We never take it all off and we just take the box away.

Put it into a spinner which spins round around, round very fast,

There's 240 species of bees and wasp in this country.

But it's only the honey bee that makes enough honey

for us to take away the excess. One bee alone

will make less than a teaspoonful of honey in its lifetime.

Was keeping bees popular in the past when royalty had big houses?

It was very popular and the aristocracy and royalty used to pay other people

to look after bees for them because it was a luxury food.

Bees were kept in the walled garden like this one to pollinate all the flowers

and the fruit and the vegetables that were in the garden.

For sweetening their foods and for medicinal purposes,

Did they use different beekeeping equipment in the past?

Very similar to what we use nowadays, but a lot more basic.

like a bag that they put over their head so their faces wouldn't get stung.

They would keep an old bunch of reeds as a smoker,

We fill it up with old egg boxes to light it,

and then we use wood pellets as the fuel to make it smoke.

you put the fuel on and then that creates the smoke.

Because they think everything is on fire.

So they go back to their stores and collect all their honey,

They would get the swarm of bees and put it in there with the sticks across

so they could make all the brood and wax in there.

They can put extra baskets on and gradually

And then the top one will have a mesh that the queen can't get through.

and they will fill this one up with just the honey

So when you wanted the honey, you could take

to refill the new one and you got the honey to take away.

How do you stop yourself from getting stung?

You don't really, you're not a beekeeper unless you have been stung.

Just keep it calm and the bees will stay calm.

They can plant bee friendly flowers that will entice the bees to the garden.

They could put little nest boxes up, not use

weed killers and harmful sprays on their plants

because we've got no insects to pollinate all our food for us.

If you want to come see the bee hives here yourself.

Come and visit the Walled Garden at Battle Abbey.

You can find out more on the English Heritage website. Bye!

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Meet the beekeeper at Battle Abbey!

bunch

brilliant

disease

proper