I just found this article in a french journal drawn from another in The Guardian.
It says that 10000 hives are counted in Berlin and its starts to create some issues.
Since some of you live there, what’s your actual experience?
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I don’t think that it is so dramatic as Benedikt tells in the article. He is a beekeeper for many years and active in the education of new beekeepers, so he knows the “old” situation very well but also the growing number of new beekeepers. He says always “learn the biology of the bees” and that is right. Lot of beekeepers are learning with a kind of kitchen recipies and do not know why they have to do a certain task in kind of bees biology. But all beekeeper have started from scratch and all beginner did mistakes (experienced beekeepers also ;-) so we should not blame the newbies too much.
Of cause it is a living animal, can get sick and the American Foulbroud is becoming more over the last years. So some older beekeeper fear that this is the consequence of a higher “density” of colonies.
Some say here is a lack of food also, but in my opinion this is rubbish as long Berlin beekeeper get the twice amount of honey in comparison with the rural beekeeper around Berlin in Brandenburg.
There is a hype with the bees, precisely the honey bees, and the next hype will be the solitary bees (or the birds). Some avant-garde wannabe hipster ecologist grumping about honey bees and postulate to save the solitary bees as competiter for (the same) food sources.
En l’absence de nourriture suffisante, certains apiculteurs sont obligés de les nourrir avec du sirop de glucose pour qu’elles survivent à l’hiver.
I don’t think that Benedikt said that in this way, this is a normal beekeeper task, done for 100 years, since we have sugar beet roots in Europe. And this year it was a hard year in the most regions of Germany. My dad in Bavaria has to feed more sugar sirup than he extracted honey this year, a reason of the cold spring and very dry summer. So it is not a Berlin problem! ;-) And there are other reports with the same conclusion (“das schlechteste Honigjahr seit 36 Jahren!”).
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Nice feedback @clemens. I do agree that this year was tough and that communication always searches for some impact news to general public.
Very interesting to see that in the city you produce more honey than out of it!