Migratory Beekeeping Reading Answers: IELTS Reading Practice Test

Migratory Beekeeping Reading Passage

Paragraph A
 

Taking Wing

To eke out a permanent living from their honey bees, about fifty per cent of the nation’s 2,000 trade apiarists stop post each spring, wandering north to find more flowers for their bees.  Apart from turning floral nectar into honey, these diligent insects also pollinate crops for farmers for a fee. As autumn approaches, the apiarists pack up their hives and go south to climb for pollination agreements in hot spots like California's fecund Central Valley.

Paragraph B
 

Of the 2,000 business apiarists in the United States, about half relocate. This pays off in two processes: moving North in the summer and South in the winter lets bees toil lengthy blooming periods, making more honey and money for their custodian. Second, apiarists can transfer their hives to farmers who need bees to breed their crops. Every spring a migrant apiarist in California may transfer up to 160 million bees to flowering fields in Gopher State, and every winter, his family may drag the hives back to California, where farmers will hire and charge the bees to breed almond and cherry trees.

Paragraph C 
 

Migrant beekeeping is nothing new. The early Egyptians moved kaolin hives, doubtless on barges, down the Nile to follow the bloom and nectar flow as it transferred to Cairo. In the 1880s, North American apiarists tested the same plan, moving bees on rafts along the Mississippi and on waterways in Florida, but their lighter, wooden hives kept falling into the water. Other keepers tried the coerce and horse-drawn wagons, but that did not demonstrate practicality. Not up to the 1920s, when cars and trucks became affordable, and roads improved, did migrant beekeeping begin to take off.

Paragraph D 
 

For the Californian apiarist, the breeding period begins in February. At this time, the honeycombs are in specific demand by farmers who have almond copse; they need two hives an acreage. For the three-week-long bloom, apiarists can rent out their hives for $32 each. It’s a windfall for the bees, too. Most people contemplate almond honey being excessively bitter to eat, so the bees get to retain it for themselves.

Paragraph E
 

By March, it is time to transfer the bees. It can take seven nights to pack the 4,000 or so hives that an apiarist may own. These are not transfers in midday because excessively of the bees would end up vagrant. But at night, the hives are piled onto wooden stretchers in sets of four and raised onto a truck. It is not compulsory to wear gloves or an apiarist's mask because the hives are not being opened, and the bees are almost silent. Just in case some are still lively, bees can be placated with a few gusts of smoke popped into each hive’s tapered entryway.

Paragraph F
 

In their new place, the apiarist will pay the agronomist to allow his bees to feed in such places as an orange copse. The honey manufactured here is scented and sweet and can be sold by the apiarist. To motivate the bees to construct as much honey as possible during this time, the apiarist opens the hives and heaps of additional boxes called supers on top. These short-term hive add-ons hold frames of vacant comb for the bees to fill with honey. In the offspring hall below, the bees will store honey to eat later. To avert the queen from creeping up to the top and putting down eggs, a screen can be put in the middle of the offspring and the supers. After three weeks, the honey can be congregated.

Paragraph G
 

Disgusting scent chemicals are frequently used to irritate bees and drive them down into the hive’s bottom boxes, leaving the honey-filled supers roughly bee-free. These can then be accomplished by the hive. They are massive with honey and might be considered to be 90 pounds each. The supers are taken to the storeroom. In the extracting room, the frames are lilted out and let down into an “unseal”, where a rotating cutlass shaves away the wax that covers all the cells. The unsealed frames are put in a whirligig filled to volume with 72 frames. A switch is overturned, and the frames begin to rotate at 300 revolutions per minute; diffusive power throws the honey out of the combs. At last, the honey is transferred into barrels for export.

Paragraph H
 

After this, roughly one-fourth of the hives weakened by sickness, mites or a declining or dead queen will have to be returned. A healthy double hive full of bees can be split into two boxes to produce new colonies. One half will hold the queen, and a young, earlier breed queen can be put in the other half to make two hives from one. The new queen will put down eggs when the flowers bloom, filling each hive with young toiler bees. The apiarist's household will then wander with them to their summer place.

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