Bees mean life

The air is alive with buzzing and whirring. As the first rays of the sun ap­pear over the hori­zon and set the Biotta Bee Ho­tel aglow, the bees are al­ready set­ting off on their for­ays to col­lect nec­tar and pollen. The wooden bee house has stood on a meadow next to Biot­ta’s juice plant since 2016. The re­tired car­pen­ter and am­a­teur bee­keeper Ernst Kreis built and in­stalled it him­self. He brings his bees to the Bee Ho­tel for the sum­mer months, from April to Oc­to­ber, and back to his api­ary in Er­matin­gen TG for the win­ter. The pro­ject was ini­ti­ated by a rel­a­tive of Kreis who used to work for Biotta. The com­pany funds var­i­ous bee pro­jects through­out Switzer­land, so it was only nat­ural to want to main­tain its own bee colonies as well. “Our found­ing fa­ther, Dr. Hugo Bran­den­berger, was well aware of the im­por­tance of bio­di­ver­sity and sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture. With the Biotta Bee Ho­tel, we want to set a good ex­am­ple for oth­ers,” says man­ag­ing di­rec­tor Clemens Rüt­ti­mann. The Bee Ho­tel is only one small part of Biot­ta’s over­all en­vi­ron­men­tal com­mit­ment. With its con­sis­tent fo­cus on or­ganic prod­ucts, the com­pany sup­ports or­ganic agri­cul­ture through­out the re­gion and opened its own wood­chip heat­ing sys­tem in 2019 to power pro­duc­tion processes and heat its build­ings us­ing green en­ergy from re­new­able raw ma­te­ri­als.

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The Biotta bees are looked af­ter by Ernst Kreis and his el­dest son. The 66-year-old has had a pas­sion for bee­keep­ing since the days of his youth. “I got my first bees while ap­pren­tic­ing as a car­pen­ter,” he says. Back in those days, bee­keep­ers had to teach them­selves. Through text­books and trade jour­nals, Kreis ac­quired all the knowl­edge that he now im­parts to oth­ers as a “god­fa­ther” for younger bee­keep­ers. Since then, api­aries have be­come highly pro­fes­sion­alised. Any­one in­ter­ested to­day in pur­su­ing the trade in Ger­man-speak­ing Switzer­land can at­tend a two-year course of­fered by the lo­cal bee­keep­ers’ as­so­ci­a­tions un­der the pa­tron­age of the um­brella or­gan­i­sa­tion “Bi­enen­Schweiz”. The or­gan­i­sa­tion de­vel­ops and dis­trib­utes prac­ti­cal teach­ing ma­te­ri­als and trains con­sul­tants who teach young bee­keep­ers how to work with bees in a so-called teach­ing api­ary. There are sim­i­lar in­sti­tu­tions in the French- and Ital­ian-speak­ing parts of Switzer­land.

Bee­keep­ing as a hobby is boom­ing. Films like “More than honey” in par­tic­u­lar have con­veyed the fa­tal con­se­quences of the global bee colony col­lapse and have raised pub­lic aware­ness of the great im­por­tance of in­sects. Ernst Kreis wel­comes this de­vel­op­ment: “Our bees could not sur­vive with­out bee­keep­ers.” The cul­prit is the Var­roa mite, which was dis­cov­ered for the first time in Switzer­land in the mid-1980s. In­tro­duced from Asia, the mites live as par­a­sites on the bees. With­out reg­u­lar acid treat­ment by the bee­keep­ers to keep the mites at bay, the bees would die within one to three years. This makes the work of the 19,000 bee­keep­ers in Switzer­land all the more cru­cial. Most of them keep bees for the pure joy of it. Or out of the de­sire to pro­tect the en­vi­ron­ment, like Ernst Kreis: “Na­ture and ecol­ogy have al­ways been im­por­tant to me.” That’s why this four-time grand­fa­ther does­n’t travel by air and dri­ves his car as lit­tle as pos­si­ble.

When the five bee colonies are stay­ing at the Biotta Bee Ho­tel, Ernst Kreis looks in on them two to three times a week. He checks, for ex­am­ple, whether a new queen is de­vel­op­ing from one of the lar­vae. If Kreis dis­cov­ers the larva in time, he re­moves it and uses it to es­tab­lish a new colony. There can only be one queen per colony. She can live for up to five years. Her sub­jects have a lifes­pan of five weeks to nine months, de­pend­ing on whether they are sum­mer or win­ter bees. A bee colony num­bers 40,000 to 60,000 in­sects at its peak. This large quan­tity of bees makes a dif­fer­ence for the sur­round­ing fields, ac­cord­ing to Ernst Kreis. Since honey bees – in con­trast to wild bees and bum­ble bees – live to­gether as a colony, they have a greater in­flu­ence on the fer­til­i­sa­tion of their sur­round­ings. They are also the only fer­til­is­ing in­sect with flower con­stancy, mean­ing that they col­lect pollen from only one plant species at a time. In this way they avoid pol­li­nat­ing the wrong plants, en­sur­ing a rich har­vest for the farm­ers in prime qual­ity. In ad­di­tion to fields and or­chards, the Biotta bees also have the choice of many gar­dens and parks in the area. This makes the lo­ca­tion of the Bee Ho­tel next to the Biotta plant ideal, says Kreis. The vil­lage stream also flows nearby. This wa­ter source is par­tic­u­larly im­por­tant in spring­time, when the bees need quite a lot of wa­ter to raise their brood.

Twice a year, Ernst Kreis col­lects the Biotta bees’ honey: spring honey in the sec­ond half of May, sum­mer honey be­tween mid-July and early Au­gust. The five colonies each pro­duce an av­er­age of about 12 kilo­grams of honey per year. Af­ter the sum­mer har­vest the feed­ing be­gins. Kreis pre­pares a feast of sugar syrup for the bees, made up of dex­trose, fruc­tose and su­crose. This re­places the honey har­vested from the bees, which they would have used as win­ter fod­der. Even af­ter 25 years of in­tense bee­keep­ing ac­tiv­ity, Ernst Kreis is still in­spired every day by the in­dus­tri­ous in­sects. “I find it fas­ci­nat­ing to ob­serve and sup­port the de­vel­op­ment of bees through­out the year.” Na­ture is surely grate­ful to him, be­cause the gar­dens and mead­ows around the Biotta plant would not bloom so mag­nif­i­cently with­out his bees.