Beekeeping for beginners - IELTS Listening Part 2 Answers

Beekeeping for beginners - IELTS Listening Part 2 Transcript

You will hear a man talking about beeekeeping for beginners.

Before you listen, you have 30 seconds to read questions 11 to 15.

Beekeeper: Good morning.

As you may be aware, all over the world, bees are under threat. For their survival, the goodwill and hard work of enthusiasts like you is vital[Q-11]. Today, I’ll present some facts about bees and beekeeping. Then, I’ll show you a Langstroth hive, which is a type commonly used by beekeepers. Bees and bee products can be eaten, and beewax used to make candles and cosmetics. And if course, bees pollinate plants, so are essential in agriculture.

There are many kinds of bees: solitary and social. Social bees live in colonies in the wild, and can be cultivated in hives.

The word eusocial describes the organisation of bee society. It’s spelt EU plus social[Q-12]. It means there’s one single reproductively active female to several males. It also signals a division of labour, and co-operative care of the young by non-breeding individuals. In addition to honeybees, there are eusocial ants, termites, and naked vole rats.

Before humans cultivated honeybees, wild colonies were raided, and sadly,this continue today. In Spain, 8,000-year-old rock drawings depict such raids while Egyptian tomb paintings from 4,500 years ago show domesticated bees[Q-13]. However, the ancient Egyptians did not understand bee society, and killed most of their insects in the quest for honey. Hives with moveable parts that ensure continual honey collection and the safety of the queen were designed just 170 years ago by the American, Lorenzo Langstroth.

It is only in the last 300 years that the functions of the different part of a bee colony and of the three types of honeybees, themselves, have been understood.

A queen honeybee is the largest and most important member of honeybee society. She lives far longer than the other bees, up to thre years; and, her pheromones control the colony. Drones, or male honeybees, make up around ten percent of a colony, and live for just four months. They mate with queens and forage, but do little else. Female worker honeybees, constituting 90% of a colony, have a mere six-week lifespan[Q-14], yet they are the busiest creatures: guarding, cleaning, nursing, fanning, and foraging.

The queen lays eggs after she has been inseminated by a drone while flying in the open air[Q-15]. She can lay up to 2,000 eggs at one time. When unmated queens hatch from those 2,000 eggs, they will fight to the death, or one will fly away with a swarm to form her own colony elsewhere. The beauty of a Langstroth hive is that a beekeeper can separate out the laying queen, and easily kill egg cells containing potential queens.

Before you listen to the rest of the conversation, you have 30 seconds to read questions 16 to 20.

So let’s look at some slides of a Langstroth hive. I can’t open my own outside as it’s winter, and not much is happening, but also because we’d all need to be wearing good protective clothing[Q-16]. Bee sting, remember, and their venom is poisonous. Two percent of people who are stung experience an uncomfortable allergic reaction, and, without medical intervention, a tiny minority die from toxic shock. Anyone who’d like to keep bees must first determine their allergic reaction first. [Q-17]

OK. Here’s a Langstroth hive with nine elements. It stands at 1.5 meters, and contains (18) extractive boxes, from where you take the honey, and (20) brood chamber, where the queen breeds. This hive’s got two extractive boxes, but you can build it up to five.

The hive is wooden, with a cover and a stand at top and bottom. There’s always a wooden lid, letter B on your diagram, and, (19) if keepers collect venom, there’s a sheet of glass below the lid. (18) The extractive boxes are shallow because they’re frequently handled. They hold 30 kilos of honey each, and a beekeeper couldn’t lift one if it were any deeper. The thin screen beneath (18) the lower extractive box has holes that drones and worker bees can crawl through, but which are too small for the queen. She, therefore, remains in (20) the deep brood chamber, where the eggs are laid. The final element, above the stand, is a board that prevents other animals from getting inside.

Narrator: You now have 30 seconds to check your answers. That is the end of Part 2.