Green Options

Britain’s government has been warned that the country will enter into an “agricultural disaster” unless more money is put towards discovering what is killing the country’s bees.

Protesters from the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA), dressed in traditional, white beekeeper suits, delivered a petition signed by more than 140,000 people to Downing Street today, calling for £8 million funding research into causes of the bee decline.

Over the past 12 months, one in three of Britain’s honey bee colonies – amounting to nearly two billion bees, have been lost.  These losses are the greatest yet for the UK.  The causes of the massive die-off are unclear, and the apiarists fear there is nothing to prevent a similar devastation in the year to come.  The beekeepers claim that the Government is doing nothing to prevent it from happening.

As summer is nearing its end and I am enjoying a garden harvest of sweet corn, cucumbers, tomatoes and sugar peas, I’ve been thinking about the bees that help make it all possible. Bees are wonderful, fascinating little beings. Not only do they produce sweat honey, but also a wax.

The wax is what forms the honey combs that the bees make to hold the honey. It is harvested when the honey is harvested and once they are stripped of the honey they can be melted and rendered to use for many purposes. Some use it as a furniture polish or a lubricant for sticky windows or drawers.

The most obvious use is for candles. You can get beeswax in two different forms in which to make candles from. One is a block and the other is sheets.