How did I start beekeeping?

I started beekeeping in my teens. My father was driven by the desire to spend our leisure time doing something more useful than the occasional idling, me and my three brothers were offered 5 hives of bees each to start working with. It turned out that he had not come to this decision by chance. He had also committed himself to the world of beekeeping with 10 hives given to him by his father. He told us that he was getting 5 bees each because there are four of us, which makes 20 families. So he is offering twice as many, as our grandfather did for him. His ideas worked, we were quite busy beekeeping. As for me, it took up all my spare time. I missed quite a few parties with my friends because I was doing it every weekend. However, I no longer feel a lack of it when it comes to anything I would have missed. It was a defining time in my life, the time I spent with my brothers and sisters we formed a bond that others might envy.

We took over the hives in Pécs, which we planted on the edge of a field in Pusztaszabolcs. At the beginning, of course, we stumbled, tried hard and struggled even more. Our father explained the basics, and for a while he came with us to the site to show us the ropes. When that knowledge was no longer enough, we turned to his sister, Tünde with our questions. She is a professional beekeeper and runs a large apiary together with the Csányi brothers, who have been beekeepers for decades. She is aware on a daily basis of what work has to be done, so we learned the craft with his help.

It was typical of the conditions at the time that pesticides were so widely used in agriculture in a way that had never been seen before or since. Even if the situation is not ideal today, the most dangerous pesticides have been banned. In the fields where they were planted were directly hit by the spray from the tractors. As a consequence, in the following years we tried to cure our bees and thus improve and increase the number of colonies, but it was a pity every year, the bees died. Our activity was suffering, but we did everything together. Together we struggled, made mistakes and we were happy when we found an effective solution for our problem.

In 3-4 years we have developed our apiary to 100 families. We did not need to provide a market because like other beekeepers, our father's company bought the honey we extracted from us. Exclusively from a purely economic point of view, it was not a profitable period. The end of the joint work reached its end when my elder brother, Botond took over the commercial management of the family business, which is a full-time job. Áron got a job in a software development company. Bernat also turned to IT, they had no time left for beekeeping.

I moved the beekeeping from the fields near Puszaszabolc to Nezde, Somogy County, not not far from where our father came from. I found an excellent location for the hives, away from the fields. The progress was immediately tangible. It was clearly demonstrated to me that it wasn't our lack of knowledge that had caused the collapse of bee colonies in the past, but the agricultural environmental damage caused by agricultural production. From then on I started working on my plan to find that technology, the essence of which is: how to get higher honey yields with relatively lesser work. I enjoyed, and still enjoy, experimenting. I see beekeeping as learning. The more relaxed middle school and the harder years of mechanical engineering at university, I was still concerned with this problem in my and I can say that every year I get better result.