Bee Tales in a Concrete Jungle

By Iris LO Hau-lam

A guard patrolled a car park, glancing over the cars, but he stiffened when he stared into a van.

Zoning out for a second, he dashed forward with stumbling steps. This is the first time he saw the mess. He needed to find the car owner.

Harry Wong Ka-hon, Cheung Ka-chung and Kong Pui-wa were strolling into the carpark as the sweaty guard was sprinting towards them.

“Bees are trying to get out of your car!” the guard yelled.

They dashed to the van, wondering why did it happen.

The three are local beekeepers, part of a growing group in Hong Kong who have honey business on farms and even rooftops in urban area. Much of their business, they say, involves dealing with people who are afraid of bees.

“I can harvest every kind of honey, whatever I want,” said Chun-kwong Chan, the beekeeping master who has taught Wong, Cheung and Kong for around one year.

Chan kept beehives in his garden behind his village house in Fanling. Several honeybees flew in and out of the hives. He has kept bees for over 40 years.

It is hard to tell how many bees Chan keeps. Theoretically, a standard hive, about 19 inches wide and 8.5 inches deep, can produce at least 7,000 adult bees.

He has 40 bee hives in his garden.

Trees like longan and lychee trees, which honey bees love to pollinate, surround Chan’s garden. “My home has a lot of superiority for beekeeping,” said Chan. Keeping countless bees and honey, he started his online business last year.

“In the past 39 years, I only kept honeybees as a hobby,” said Chan, “I’ve never thought of starting a business until my friends set up a Facebook page for me.”

Honey is not the only product made by bees, but also propolis, beeswax and even pupae.

Chan, 70, retired and sold honey online, he also taught people beekeeping, and then sells beehives to them. That was how Chan met Wong, Cheung and Kong.

“Hong Kong is too small and lacking of tree species to harvest different kinds of honey, as many as mainlanders do,” said Chan, hearing that Wong, Cheung and Kong set up a company called Beetales. “I don’t care whether they can be succeed, I just want someone to inherit the skills.”

Beetales is one of the upbringing business in Hong Kong launched 1 year ago. Local young beekeepers embraced their hobbies by starting a small business. They gathered on an online platform Hong Kong Raw Honey to share their learning experience.

Most of local beekeepers sold their honey and side-products as lipsticks and mead in the local market. They would kept their hives at the rural areas like farms at Yuen Long and North District.

But some beekeepers kept hives for hobbies. Like Chan, they kept beehives behind their village houses. Enthusiasm influences others. Neighbors in Mui Wo and Lamma Island built up “beehives villages” in their backyards.

In the carpark, Wong and Cheung dashed back to the van. About 300 hundred bees were flying inside the car. The golden liquid, the urination of bees are everywhere in the van.

“That…is so messy,” Cheung said and sighed.

He opened the door, and the escaped bees flew away. He quickly sealed the hole of the hive with a plastic tarp.

Getting beehives from Chan is one of their routines they have had since around 1 years ago, being beekeepers in Hong Kong.

A beehive has a hole on the bottom right corner, so that honeybees can fly out for pollinating in the morning and back in hives in the evening. But honeybees could easily flew out of the box if the beekeepers recklessly left the hole unsealed. After they settled down the trouble, Cheung drove again, while dozens of bees were freely flying next to them in the journey.

Master beekeeper like Chan can attract bees in the country parks, while the three beekeepers were learning to attract bees in the park, they were still getting bees from their Sifu’s beehives.

Back to a farm at Yuen Long, Kong, 23, wearing goggles, driving a nail into a carton-like wooden box. She was building artificial hives for the newcomers.

Kong is an university student, studying the environment program. Inside the artificial hives, four wooden frames are vertically hanging over, the distance between such frames are just as narrow as tree and wood cracks, at where honey bees love building their hives naturally.

Honeybees can still build up their own hives without artificial ones. Worker honeybees, who are all humongous, can only live for around six weeks. They devotes to pollinate and build hives while drone spent their lives for mating with queen bees.

When worker bees turns to 10 days old, they developed wax-producing gland. After eating honey, their glands covert sugar of honey into wax. Chewing and softening the wax with a bit of honey, they bond beeswax into the hexagonal cells of a honeycomb for the irregular beehives.

Living in artificial hives, honey bees still have to chew up the honeycomb by themselves, but not between cracks with dangerous threats of wasps and flies, who attack them or corrode their hives.

Each rectangle honey frame is built with log with three steel wires horizontally. About five frames placed vertically into the a carton-like hive with a rectangle hole in the bottom right corner.

Kong installed a temperature indicator on the hive wall, ensuring the temperature was below 30 Celsius for honey bees to survive. She painted the lid of the hives into different color, and put them under the canopy. Six hives gathered in a rainbow colors.

She made a Langstroth hive, the modern American beehive, which has been improved over its long history.

Rock painting of a honey seeker climbing on a tree, fighting with bees while robbing the honey. It is the earliest evidence of beekeepers, which was found near Valencia in Spain, dating back 8000 years.

The pioneers directly tore natural hives apart, squeezed the hives to harvest honey. However, they would kill all of the pupae inside the hives which devastated the sustainability of hives.

Building a Langstroth hive, beekeepers are easier to extract honey than before. When they sliced a piece of hives, honey spilled over but the pupa can still survive in the middle of the hive. Over years of improvements, steel wires are the toughest material for stabilizing the hives. The hive produced 10 to 200 pounds honey in a year.

The Hong Kong beekeeping industry has a long history as well. The first local beekeeping company, Po San Yuen at Fanling, has launched for over 90 years. The products are omnipresent in local supermarkets.

Wong and Cheung was back to the farm, they had to focus on maintaining hives. They have to shuttle between urban areas and suburbs for maintaining hives twice a week in summer and almost every day in the winter and spring, the harvesting seasons.

Maintaining beehives is far more complicated than imagined. Grabbing a frame out of the hives, Wong was quietly staring at bees to make sure every female bee body had clear yellow-and-black stripes, and male bees had six robust legs. He was checking their health conditions.

Cheung checked another hive, he gently blew bees off the hives, looking for some threats that he had to erase.

Parasites like galleria mellonella, also knows as the honeycomb moth, are the main threat to honey bees. The moths loves sneaking into beehives, eat or chew bee pupae to deformity. Because bees store sweet honey into their stomachs, they are delicious desserts for wasps, hornets, omnivorous dragonflies, leopards, toads, birds and cockroaches.

Chung clipped a wasp out of the hive.

A one-inch-long wasp invaded into a beehive while Cheung was checking the hive. Several apis ceranae, the only honey bee species in Hong Kong, crawled over it. The wasp was double larger than an apis cerana, which was only about nine millimeter long. But the wasp failed to invade the hive, it was dying.

Wasps cannot survive when they are overheated. Several tiny apis ceranae killed a giant wasp. They used their body heat to burn it to death.

At least 20,000 bee species were found all over the world, but only four main species are recognized as “honey bees”, apis ceranae are one of them. Other species like wasps are different, they are larger than apis, and more aggressive. They will fly into apartments, attack people with prominent stingers, but they do not produce honey.

Apis ceranae , the main species of honey bees in Hong Kong, seldom fly into houses. That means, people always get stung by wasps, hornets, but not honey bees .

“Apis ceranae are the most mild species among bees,” said Wong, taking a honey frame out. He gently blew the bees off the board, bees crawled a bit away, several hexagonal honeycombs showed up.

Some holes were sparkling with honey, while some holes were covered with white dots. Behind this white veil, some baby bees were living there peacefully with satisfying food.

Throughout the whole process, Wong does not wear a mask or gloves. “Our Sifu taught us that we have to keep the connection with bees and nature.”

They did not wear any special protections even when they learnt to be beekeepers.

“Everyone got stung at the beginning,” said Wong, “but that’s fine. They only sting you when you hurt them, or slammed them in your fingers.”

They only experienced the dramatic bee chasing scene when they gradually waving a fan towards bees to blow them off the broad for harvesting.

“We learnt that online, we thought it would work,” Wong chuckles, obviously things did not go well.

Clouds of bees bumped against their bodies, surrounded them, then stung them. Bees chased after them for at least 10 meters, then slowly returned to their own hives. Beekeepers were all left with at least five red dots.

Honeybees sting on humans only when they are threaten by serious attack. But they would not use it all the time. When they sting on human’s skin, their stingers, together with their organs, will be pull out and engulf into human skin, causes their deaths.

The proteins of bee venom will affect skin cells and immune system, causing pain and swelling. According to the Journal of Asthma and Allergy, about 5 to 7.5 percent of people will be allergic to insect stings when the venom triggers a more active immune system reaction.

People with allergic with stings might have severe redness of wounds, getting swollen tongue or throat, and even nausea, vomiting and the most serious symptom, loss of consciousness. The risk on beekeepers increases to 32 percent.

“Bees are not scary though,” said Cheung, pulling out the stingers, covering wounds by ice bags. He was bitten by a wasp on his nose when he was 10 years old. “Honey bees are cute,” he said.

An urbanite, I was hardly convinced. So I joined their bee workshop.

When I arrived on the farm at Ngau Tam Mei, Yuen Long, Rainis Chong, was playing with a baby bee.

“Hey, do you want to play with this baby bee?” Chong asked me.

I thought about what I will do if the bee crazily climbed all over my body.

“Put your nail on her hand, bees follow human nails,” said Cheung quietly.

So I did that. The bee crawled on my nail. I slowly turned my palm over, the bee automatically crawled on my palm. The bee peacefully climbed over my hand. It barely stopped, but it did not bite me.

We walked into the beehives, we tasted some propolis, some honey spills over my hands and my camera, so I quickly put the whole propolis into my mouth and chewed.

Unlike honey tea that I drunk in a café, the sweetness was the most richest that I had ever tasted. This was the longan honey, which was the most sweetest honey among others like lychee honey. The propolis squeezed while I was eating honey, some of them stuck on my teeth.

Two bees flew on my fingers and lens. I felt something slightly shave my skin. Bees were eating honey by their red tube-like tongues. Some bees fly away when their stomachs are bulging with honey.

Cheung put a few cups of honey on hives, some bees flew towards them, and soaked into the cup of honey to enjoy their honey paradise while some bees fly on flowers or cones for pollination.

“I got stung by wasps when I was 10,” said Cheung, “but now I know wasps and the honeybee are different.”

Beehives could even build in the urban area, a beekeeper has already kept bees near the Wholesale Fruit Market at Yau Ma Tei for over four years, but he refused to reveal the name and his own identity.

He replied on text that he “don’t want to cost any terrible or damages on beehives after disclosing the details.” Hong Kong government did not imposed regulations and licensing systems on beekeepers, but he was still afraid of letting his neighbors know.

The Food and Environmental Hygiene Department removed 1767 beehives in public areas in 2020, according to the government, but it did not distinguish between wasp hives and honey bee hives clearly.

Wong and Cheung also talked about the history of beekeeping and basic knowledges of bee species in the workshop. They introduced their business plan of “A home for urban bee”, gathering partners to keep bees at urban, or even at the rooftops of their homes, and sell honey. Jose Law was elated to the plan.

“I want to keep a honey bee hive at my house for a long time,” said Jose Law, “because I’m a honey fiend. I want to harvest honey by myself.”

Law lives in a typical three-story village house in Hong Kong, a suitable environment to build an artificial hive on his rooftop. He might be a potential partner of Beetales to build up a local business chain.

“Learning to keep bees is hard,” said Tavis Du Preez, 58, a Canadian who put his bee hives in his garden at Lamma Island six months ago.

Not only learning how to look after emotions and habits of honey bees, but he also had to learn the basic knowledge about honey bees species.

Unlike Wong, Cheung and Kong, Du Preez wears an upper white protection gear, with white thick gloves and a black face veil when bees are more aggressive when their hives lack a queen bee.

Worker honeybees will choose a queen bee for mating with a drone, the male honeybee. They will protect queen bees to become mature. But if the queen bee die, the colony would be unstable and even forgo the hive to find the new one for raising another queen bee.

If Du Preez approached to the hive, the colony might be feel the environment more threatening than before.

“That’s the problem I have to deal with,” said Du Preez, “sometimes I am still afraid of being stung by bees.”

In Hong Kong, no matter if it is a wasp, hornet, or an apis cerana, people call it with the same pronunciation of “Fong”, which means “bees” in English. “Sometimes, lack of knowledge creates irrational fears towards honey bees,” said Du Preez.

“Education is very important,” said Du Preez, “I keep bees because of my daughter, I want her to know more about the natural.”

The 9-year-old daughter is not afraid of insects. Sometimes she will go to the garden, stick honey on her little palm, and let bees enjoy their meals.

Du Preez works as a English teacher, and he talked to a school officer to build beehives at the school. The school did not have a plan of beekeeping yet, but Du Preez hoped the school will launched the program in the future.

“I’m doing a tiny bit of help for the world,” said Du Preez.

Between 1947 and 2008, according to the Journal of Invertebrate Pathology, the number of honeybees decreased from 5.8 million to 2.3 million.

Beekeepers reported high coy losses while the crowd of worker bees disappeared, leaving the queen bee and immature bees in the original hives of the United States in 2006, which called Colony Collapse Disorder.

In winter of 2008, beekeepers lost 28.1 percent of their bees, according to the National Management Survey by Bee Informed Partnership, they lost increased to 43.7 percent and 35.6 percent in 2010 and 2019 respectively.

Drastic drop of number of honeybees also affected other industries like agriculture. Fewer honeybees leaded to fewer natural pollination on plants, which raises the cost of artificial feedstock by farmers.

Cheung and Wong, 35 and 33, had the first idea of learning beekeeping after travelling to Madagascar two years ago, which changed their entire life.

Madagascar was one of the poorest country with the 112th ranking of 178 countries at the 2021 Index of Economic Freedom.

Farming is the backbone of the country’s economy, which consisted of 30 percent of GDP.

Wong and Cheung thought beekeeping might be a viable business that will help with pollination after massive deforestation.

“Beekeeping is a potential for Madagascans to earn their livings while protecting their lands,” said Wong.

Africa is gifted with a diversity of wild honey bees species. In Ethiopia, annual honey production was estimated at about 43 thousand metric tons, shared with around 23.5 percent and 2.35 percent of African and worldwide honey production. The country ranks the biggest beekeeping industry in Africa and the tenth in the globe.

If the COVID-19 ended, their next stop would be back to Madagascar. Bees mattered to Hong Kong, and to everywhere on the planet.

The beekeepers wore black veils over their faces, that was the only time that they would wear gear because bees might be aggressive.

They were harvesting the honey.

Bees bumped against Wong's veil, but they did not sting him. Wong let bees keep away from the hive, and put it inside a transparent cylinder.

The frame was vertically hung inside the cylinder. Wong pressed the button, then the frame turned rapidly.

Golden liquid splashed on the cylinder. Liquid slided to the bottom of the machine. Wong gently put the hive back, bees covered the hive again. Inside the honeycombs, the pupae still quietly crawled behind the thick white veils, eating their honey.

Wong only extracted the excessive honey in the hives.

In summer, Wong still have to check the conditions on every hives. He was gluing a yellow

“Sometimes, I am still worried about they didn’t have enough honey to eat,” said Wong, gluing a thick yellow mixture of sugar and pollen on the edges of a hive, “they gave us their honey, sometimes, I have to give them back when they don’t have enough food.”