Chapter 12 fourth quarter

A beekeeper is someone who uses bees to collect honey from pollen. Beekeeping is generally divided into two forms, mobile beekeeping and fixed-point beekeeping. Mobile beekeepers follow the flowering season from Kagoshima in the south to Hokkaido in the north.There are very few such beekeepers.There are only six or seven groups in the whole country.This is because the speed of development and utilization of land has accelerated, so that the flowering zone as a nectar source is getting smaller and smaller.And in these narrow nectar source areas, the vested rights of beekeepers have been formed since the Meiji era, and mobile beekeepers cannot enter.

The vested rights adopt a hereditary system, which has continued from the late Meiji period to the present.Most of them have gone through three generations of operation so far.If the son or grandson did not inherit, disciples were recruited, in which case the guild system was adopted. In addition to the reason of vested rights, there is also the problem of loss. Fixed-point beekeeping refers to local professional beekeepers.There are many beekeepers of this type. Mobile beekeepers travel around the country with colonies of about 250 honeybees.The number of bees is about 10 to 15 million.If these bees are released together, they will block out the sky and the sun, and the sound of the bees' wings can be heard four or five kilometers away.The sales volume of the honey collected by these bees is less than 10 million yen. Excluding all kinds of expenses, there can barely be a net income of 2 to 3 million yen per year.

Even small-scale beekeeping can be profitable since fixed-point beekeeping requires no moving costs. Beekeeping can also serve as a sideline for orchard pollination. In the past, orchards employed nearby female workers to pollinate the fruit trees with brushes.Artificial pollination can easily deform the fruit.But bee pollination does not have to worry about such problems. For example, in Aomori Prefecture, when the pollination season comes, an apple orchard of 15 hectares will have to pay 500,000 yen in pollination fees.In addition, beekeepers can also collect four or five cans (one bucket per can) of honey.

Showa fifty-three years (1978) statistics show that there are eleven thousand and fifty-six beekeepers in Japan.For example, in Fukuoka, there are 360 ​​beekeepers. The cultivation area of ​​nectar plants is 9,971 hectares. Honey production is 375 kilograms. The production of honey in Kagoshima Prefecture is 317 kilograms. Fukuoka Prefecture also has statistics on the number of small-scale beekeepers coming in from outside the prefecture. In Showa 52 (1977), there were 73 applications nationwide and 72 were approved. Kagoshima applied for 928 applications and approved 915 applications.

Application for moving within the prefecture, Fukuoka 2071, approved 2041.Kagoshima applied for 900 applications and approved 900 applications, that is, in Showa 52 (1977), 72 people from outside the prefecture came to this prefecture, including mobile beekeepers in the prefecture, a total of 2,100 Thirteen are engaged in beekeeping. Kagoshima Prefecture has 1,815 people.A considerable majority of people move within the prefecture. The operation of mobile beekeeping is as follows. Hatch bees in January.Overwintering honeybees are reduced from 50,000 to 60,000 per group to 3,000 to 5,000 during the honey-gathering season, and then return to 50,000-60,000 per group when the honey-gathering season approaches.There must be one queen bee in each colony of bees.And among the larvae, there must be one as a candidate for the queen bee, fed with royal jelly.Before the queen bee candidate hatches, if the queen bee is still alive, it is eaten by the worker bees, and then other candidate queen bees are bred.

When the old queen becomes weak, a new queen is produced.When the old queen bee learns that there is a new queen bee, she leaves the nest and takes half of the bees with her.This is the so-called sub-bee that is usually said. Artificial bee sorting should protect the candidate queen bee from being eaten, and the bees will be naturally sorted after protection. The queen bees reproduce desperately, and soon the number of bees in this group will reach 50,000 to 60,000.Like this, two hundred to two hundred and fifty groups of bees are just about ten million honeybees.Mobile beekeepers are busy making preparations in January every year. As soon as February enters, they gather in Kagoshima, the first stop of departure, and many people go to Osumi Peninsula.There are many flat lands and many flowers, most of which are milk vetch, rapeseed, buckwheat and other flowers.The time to stay in Kagoshima is from early February to early April.During this period, some people also moved to Kumamoto.Kumamoto's beekeeping resort is Mt. Aso.The honey picking season in Jiuzhou generally ends in May.Not to mention the fixed-point beekeepers, most of the small-scale mobile beekeepers left Jiuzhou at this time.

From April to June, there are people who go to Shimane and Tottori, and those who move to the Yamagata area.Bees are kept at the foot of Dewa Sanzan to collect Japanese horse chestnut pollen. Mobile beekeepers do not go to the central regions.This is because the center of beekeeping has been in Gifu since ancient times, and it is not easy to go to the central area without a suitable road. The flowering periods of Yamagata, Akita, and Aomori gradually move northward.In June during the rainy season, pollen of acacia and Japanese horse chestnut is collected around Lake Towada.These flowers bloom until late June in the Hokkaido area.Collecting acacia and alfalfa pollen in the Ishikari River basin.Honey harvesting ends in July.This is because the flowers in spring and summer are in pieces, but the flowers in autumn are not.

August is the season for collecting royal jelly.Royal jelly is the food of the queen bee. In order to cultivate the queen bee, there are 500 to 1,000 guards.The saliva spit out by these bees is royal jelly. If the royal jelly is taken away, the Imperial Guard will naturally increase the amount and continue to produce royal jelly.For the prosperity of their offspring, bees are endlessly fooled by humans.As a result, a group of 50,000 to 60,000 bees are busy making royal oar. Soon, the bees died of exhaustion.The queen bee is also physically weak, and the number of babies produced has dropped sharply.In about a month, tens of thousands of bees were reduced to hundreds, and these hundreds of bees were left for the winter.

When overwintering, the beehives should be placed in the house to maintain a certain temperature. The food of winter bees is sugar water and poisonous honey.Honey that feels numb when licked with the tongue is poisonous honey.Poison honey has no other use than as bee bait. Beekeepers come to the factory in September and October to wait as temporary workers or do some farm work. There is little joy in their lives. Many beekeepers are employed but remain solitary and unsocial.This is due to prolonged solitude.They were separated from their wives and children during the mobile bee release.The most difficult thing for them is sexual trouble.It's okay to have places like Turkish baths, but not everywhere you go.

It can be said that beekeeping is a job that does not get much repayment for the labor paid.Recently, honey imports in Japan have been increasing, and beekeeping is on the brink of extinction. The above is the actual situation of beekeepers learned from the investigation of Kiyomura No. 1 Prison Office. Qingcun is waiting for the report. After learning about the situation of the beekeeper, Qing Cun immediately returned to the Joint Search Headquarters. He wanted to investigate who the beekeeper who had abandoned the burned camper on Ganzi Mountain was. Qingcun did not explain the details to the investigators of the headquarters, but only ordered this person to be found.

Ji Zong from the Special Search Department of the Kanto District Prosecutor's Office flashed in his mind again.The scouts had been out for several hours and had not heard from any quarter. One picture after another turned over and over in Qingcun's mind. The two prosecutors who were strangled to death, and the prosecutor Morimoto of the Hyogo prefecture whose whereabouts are unknown. The yacht Ridge sailing in a storm. Two sailors killed. The corpse of a woman with only her carcass floating on Mijima, an isolated island in the Sea of ​​Japan. Track down the boy on Mijima. A boy who offered flowers and incense sticks and left silently. A beekeeper man and woman leave after taking off the license plate from a burnt-out camper van. —Are they at the forefront of the flowering passage? Qingcun stared at the pictures that appeared repeatedly and asked himself.