Welcome to Nu-Life BeeKeepers.

We are a bee keeping company that likes to have a green footprint on the world. We encourage our apiarists to think about the whole ecology of keeping bees. We supply ‘houses for the bees’ but don’t interfere on how they want to live.

Honey bees consist of three types in a hive. The queen bee, worker bee and drones bee. The worker bees are all female and can sting. The drones are male and cannot sting. They just mate with queens in the air. The worker bees control the hive, collect nectar, and make honey. The queen just lays eggs.

Honey has become a problem with unscrupulous importers bringing in honey that should be irradiated. Non irradiated imports of honey bring in diseases. These diseases can kill our bees. Bees in South Africa make some of the best and purest honey in the world.

We have two types of honey bees in South Africa. The cape bee ( Apis mellifera capensis ) and african bee ( Apis mellifera scutellata ). There is a natural barrier that separates these two species. However these two should never be mixed. Unfortunately bee keepers ignorant of this fact have transgressed this natural law by bringing the cape bees over the natural barrier to the african bee areas . They have created a problem of cape clone bees. These bees all want to be queens and since there are no workers the whole hive dies out. These pseudo queens then look for new hives to infect and lay more clones and the whole cycle repeats itself.

We humans like to control nature. We forget nature is designed for our well being. It does not need controlling. Honey bees know what they want and understand their needs better than we will ever be able to. They know how to breed and expand a brood nest. They have complex communication structures. Of which as humans we still do not understand fully. They can dance and emit sounds. They can communicate in total darkness. One dance they do is tell other bees where the nectar and pollen is. This dance gives the the direction and distance of the nectar source. A bees nose is extremely sensitive, their smell is so sensitive they can smell 1 part in a trillion parts (1ppt). A sharks smell is only 1 part in a million parts (1ppm).