A new television program airing on the National Geographic channel called “Doomsday Preppers” takes the idea of a self-sustained lifestyle to new limits. Each week, the show follows a person or group of people who are preparing for what they believe will be the end of the world. They set up shelters that can sustain them ‘off the grid’ and stockpile food, water, medical supplies and weapons for themselves and their families.
One woman, Kathy Harrison from New England, calls herself the Doris Day of Doom. She is preparing for the end of the world by raising bees. Not only do bees produce honey, a food product which does not ever go bad but that food product, she says, will be instrumental in trading for other goods. Her idea is not so farfetched. You can learn a little more about what Harrison and her community are doing to prepare in the video to the left.
Bees are essential for an agricultural society. While other insects such as butterflies, grasshoppers and other flying insects can pollinate flowers, bees are the work horses of the pollination world. Without pollination, flowers do not trigger the plant’s reproductive cycle and we get no fruits, vegetables or new plants. Maintaining bee colonies would therefore, be extremely important to survival after a catastrophic disaster.
But disaster aside, in a self-sustained lifestyle, bee keeping can be an integral part of your planning. They take relatively little space and very little work. You can buy a small bee hive set up for between $100 and $200. You can even buy a queen and some starter bees for a few dollars more. You may need to provide some sugar water initially until the bees make some workers and start scavenging for food of their own. The other thing you need to provide is access to flowers. Farm fields, fruit orchards, even gardens can help support a bee hive. Even fields of clover and other grasses can do the trick.
Along with your bee hive, you can buy a starter kit for controlling the bees when it is time to make honey. A smoker which allows you to burn a small amount of wood and direct a light stream of smoke toward the bees to make them drowsy permits you to remove the honey screens in relative safety when the time is right.
A single hive can make several pints or even quarts of honey each year, depending on the size of the hive. You can use the honey yourself and stockpile the excess. You can give it as gifts to friends and family or even make a tidy sum selling it at a local farm stand.
In addition to being a valuable foodstuff, honey is reputed to have certain medicinal qualities. In theory, honey made from bees raised locally can help with allergies. When bees visit flowers to retrieve nectar, they also pick up pollen, the culprit responsible for triggering so many allergy attacks. The pollen gets blended into the honey. The honey then works much like a vaccination. By introducing a dummy version of the “germ”, the body responds by producing an immune response which In turn produces antibodies. Then when breathe in the pollen, you r body is equipped with antibodies to fight off the pollen invasion.
Raising bees may seem a little much but the hive really only takes up about 2 square feet of space and you only have to make the honey once a year. The bees do all the rest of the work. There are beekeeping clubs and organizations all over the country willing to help you get started. You can contact Illinois State Beekeepers Association, the Southern Illinois Beekeepers, or Bees-on-the-Net Illinois Beekeepersfor assistance in removing or establishing a hive. And don’t forget to tune into the “Doomsday Preppers” on National Geographic every Tuesday at 9:00 p.m.
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