Insight/opinion

A Bee line to Gold

By Dr Garth Cambray

As the world twitches in recession, gold, that ancient repository of value has been enjoying increased popularity as an investment. Africa has always been a large producer of gold, and hence the price of gold has a direct effect on the future of Africa. In this article we look at something that has never been used as an indicator of gold sales before – the beehive in the mosque at the Taj Mahal.

The beehive in the mosque on the left side of the Taj Mahal. This is a medium sized hive with about 200 000 bees in it. Photo credit: G. Cambray

 

Our natural environment and our economy are intricately linked. Agriculture provides the power that at the end of the day runs our people, so without food, we don’t have an economy. India has a very large number of small farmers and these farmers invest their profits in gold jewellery – hence, a good agricultural season in India increases gold demand, and a bad harvest the opposite.

The 10km foraging radius of the bees around the Taj Mahal includes a large number of mustard fields on the banks of the Yamuna river. Every beehive will cover a similar amount of land, showing again, the importance of bees in our ecosystem and economy.

The bees in India are responsible for pollinating crops such as mustard seed and various beans, mangos, other fruits, nuts and squashes. I have seen the hive in the Taj on two occasions now – in late January 2007 and in early February 2009. The bees are the giant Asian honeybee, Apis dorsata, who build hanging comb colonies. Typically the hives would hang from tree branches, or from cliff overhangs in nature. In the modern Indian environment, the bees more often make their nests hanging from street trees, water towers, sky scrapers and ancient monuments such as the Taj.

A single Apis dorsata colony can have hundreds of thousands of individual bees in it, and compared to their domesticated cousins, Apis mellifera, who forage over a distance of 3-6km, the larger Apis dorsata forages over a region of around about 10 kilometers.

In the case of a medium size colony such as the one in the Taj Mahal, the bees will fly out of Agra into the surrounding mustard fields and pollinate flowers there. In Jan-Feb the mustard, a quick cash crop, flowers profusely turning the country side of northern India yellow. Mustard is a crop which requires cross pollination by insects to set seed. Mustard regenerates the soil and prepares it for the more aggressively nutrient hungry crops which are planted in spring, such as rice. The mustard seed is harvested in February to March and the seeds are processed, depending on cultivar, into a number of products, such as spices, mustard flour and mustard oil. The plant matter is fed to cattle in many cases mixed with other fodder crops.

Each Apis dorsata forager, according to researchers in India, visits in the region of 15 flowers per minute, and repeat visits give greater pollination. It is critical for pollination of Indian mustard that the flowers be provided with pollen from another flower to ensure proper seed set. Hence it can be roughly calculated that one colony of Apis dorsata, such as the one on the Taj Mahal, with a population of about 200 000 bees and 50 000 foragers will result in the creation of around about 45 million mustard seeds per hour – or, at a seed weight of 0.0035g/seed, about 157.5kg/hour, 1.26 tons per day, and 50 tons over the total flowering period of the mustard.

Mustard fields near the Taj Mahal in Agra. Each flower must be visited by a bee to be pollinated and produce a seed.  Photo credit G. Cambray

If the seasons before were unfavourable, the beehive may not have been able to develop as many workers ready to pollinate the canola flowers. If one then works on a work force of only 25 000 workers, it means that the bees will only be able to pollinate 25 tons of mustard seed over the season, and farmers will get an overall much lower yield, which means they will have less money at the end of the season, and hence, the farmers will buy less gold and as a result, gold demand will be lower and this will be a contributing factor to a generally lower gold price.

In this way, a simple beehive at the corner of the Taj Mahal gives us an indication of the health of beehives in the surrounding areas, and from this we can gain a small indication of the success of the forthcoming mustard crop, and the impact of that on the gold price, and of course the higher the gold price, the better the hundreds of thousands of people in Africa who are related to the gold mining industry will fare.

More information:

 Dr Garth Cambray is a beekeeper and biotechnologist based at Makana Meadery in Grahamstown, South Africa

Further reading: http://www.zoosprint.org/ZooPrintJournal/2006/April/2226-2227.pdf

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