2024-04-06 21:41:35
The whole family helps
Although the beekeeper says that he does not live in this homestead and commutes from Kaunas, the family members are strongly against it – they spend so much time in the homestead that it seems as if it is his home. As the interviewer says, living in this place is his and his wife’s dream.
No matter how you look at the craft of beekeeping, it is a vocation, the interviewer assures. And entrepreneurship can appear at any age, it does not depend on the year at all. However, Mindaugas laughs that his son keeps telling him that he is still too young for beekeeping.
“Beekeeping started with the fact that there was a grandfather living in the neighborhood who had bees. I’ve always lived in Kaunas, but all summers were here and the honey was delicious, and I wasn’t afraid of bees,” he says. However, after the eighth grade, Mindaugas had several thoughts: he thought of becoming either a technician-mechanic, or a forester, or a beekeeper.
Although it is difficult to call beekeeping a hobby, it all started with 24 hives. He learned how to deal with bees, how to reproduce them, and then there were no brakes and the number of hives increased sometimes. Taking care of so many hives is the real physical work.
Although the wife herself is allergic to bees, the children help on the farm. According to the beekeeper, the most help is needed when it is time to harvest the honey. And the working year itself is from spring to autumn.
It’s hard to call such an activity a hobby when he has collected about 3.5 tons of honey during the season. At that time in 2022 was about 800 kg due to bad weather, and in 2023 – about 2 tons.
Honey ends up in the markets of Kaunas and Elektrėnai and travels from hand to hand to friends of friends – both the job and the fact that the locals know this beekeeper and his honey very well.
As he says, the taste of honey depends on what grows around and what the weather is like. For example, in 2023, the first honey was as bright as you have never seen in your life. The son even raised the drone to look, maybe there is rapeseed or other plants nearby, but nothing like that. It seems that nature is changing in this village as well.
As a child, raspberries were brought here in buckets, but now there is no such harvest. And why they disappeared – I don’t know, there aren’t so many mushrooms here anymore. “Grandma told me that before Elektrėnai, the forest was full of mushrooms, and after Elektrėnai, there were no more mushrooms,” Mindaugas recalled.
You have to climb to the tops of pine trees, protect bees from hornets
Over a decade working on the farm with bees has been the most exciting adventure. The beekeeper says that he has had to climb a ladder to the top of a pine tree.
“There are pine trees here, on top of which I sat,” says the beekeeper, looking around. – Somewhere on the peak, the swarms are hanging out and climbing the ladder to catch him to the top of the pine tree. It has happened that I was almost on two peaks. But there is a natural reproduction of bees and you can’t avoid it.”
There are no less challenges in preparing for winter. The bees must be fed, the nests narrowed according to the number of bees, they are treated with medicines against the so-called mites.
And at the beginning of spring, it is checked whether there is enough food. The behavior of bees is largely determined by nature, because it is better when the frosts come and go quickly and the winter is not warm.
If they don’t hibernate in time, they begin to produce brood – new bees – which use up their food, fail to mature or even die along with their family.
When bees begin to sleep, small hornets can start to cut them.
2024-04-06 21:41:35