sun will shine....please

Today looks like a it will be a spring day so I will travel around to check the hives, it will hopefully be sunny and get up to 14C, and spring flowers are starting to show so I hope to see bees carrying pollen (protein) on their back legs to feed the Queen.

Last night I spent an enjoyable evening at the last of my General Bee Husbandry study group unravelling the mysteries of Queen introduction (not gay bar style introduction, but surprisingly similar in having the right queen at the right time). There are many reasons that you would want introduce a new Queen to your colony most of which are to do with a general breeding program and colony temperament and and queen failure (the queen does get old and tired and fails to lay viable eggs).

 The great revelation of the evening was an understanding of Snelgrove and the Snelgrove method of swarm management it is quite complicated to get your head around, but when you lay it out and map the procedure it becomes surprisingly simple, so be warned my training groups, you will be trained in  Snelgrove in 2011

and after finding Snegrove boards available at £8 each on-line  it will be a inexpensive option.

Bees in Australia

I just had a chat with my father back in Australia and he has resorted to going around his vegetable garden with a artist paint brush pollinating his plants by hand, oh the joys of retirement at 81 years old.I have suggested that he really should look into getting some bees. There is a native Australian social bee (lives in a colony) which is sting-less and would be suitable for his garden. These bees live in smaller colonies than the European Bee and early colonists watched brave Australian Aboriginals gather honey with out the aid of masks and protection not realising these were a sting less variety. If course these bees live in temperate climbs an do not have the need to store honey for the winter months so the colony's stay compact the estimate that you could harvest about 1kg from a colony a year (compared to 20 to 50 kg a year with the European bee). It is for the pollination and not the honey that he needs the bees, the same applies to all of us as 33% of everything we eat requires an insect pollinator. I hope you will support a local bee-keeper or bee conservation group or invest in some nice sable artist brushes.

Oh dreaming again

It is a rainy morning in Izmit (Turkey) I am lead to believe it is Allah crying because I am going home, it always rains when I leave Turkey (not true but it does often rain when I leave).

I always dream about the bees when I am away and last night was no exception. In my dream I had left my bees in a village which was the village I grew up in Australia but full of people from a village I used to live in, in Somerset. I arrived back and my bee hives had disappeared. Interestingly I treat this as a good omen once I came back from Turkey and one of my bee hives had been destroyed by a deliberate insecticide attack and I didn't dream about bees then.

Any way the good news is I won the Beehive on Ebay It is now paid for £79 inc. delivery, so I must get the hammer ready when it arrives.......back to the last of the packing.

Getting ready for spring

I am preparing myself for the season ahead.
I have ordered 4 Polystyrene NUC boxes (Nuc boxes are Half brood boxes for raising small colonies, hatching queens and swarms until they establish themselves)
I have started biding on Ebay for new Hives ready to house new colonies.
Get that money out.

February 17th 2011

The temperature is sneaking up above 10C.
The bees are sneaking out to find some pollen, the queen needs feeding.
Pollen is the protein in a bees diet and the queen needs to create new eggs.
in 3 weeks the eggs will hatch building up the colony for a spring harvest.
please think about bees when you plan your garden early flowers give the much needed pollen