Posted in Bee Lore, Bee Present, Beetwixt & Beetween on March 13, 2014| Leave a Comment »
“The Sphinx, the Pyramids,
the stone temples are, all of them,
ultimately as flimsy as London Bridge;
our cities but tents set up in the cosmos.
We pass.
But what the bee knows,
the wisdom that sustains our passing life
– however much we deny or ignore it –
that for ever remains.”
P.L. Travers
Posted in Bee Lore, Bee Present on January 1, 2013| Leave a Comment »
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 41,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 9 Film Festivals
Posted in Bee Law, Bee Lore, Bee Present, Beekeeping, Beetwixt & Beetween on May 23, 2012| 2 Comments »
We caught the first swarm of the season on Monday night. It was 18ft up in a bush – and I had to use an extension to my long pole (used for painting) to get the box up there. Luckily Dennis (whose garden it was) had an additional 3 poles which I used to extend my pole as well as get the smoker up there!
The photo looks as though I am trying to catch the sun!
Having inspected the hives on Saturday, Faith is still very weak and I somehow doubt will come through as I have now tried to re-queen her twice. We therefore decided to call this swarm “Hope” to keep the spirit of our three first hives – Faith, Hope and Charity. The original Hope and Charity died off in 2005, but Faith has kept going since then. Oh – and it was luck that the place that we caught the hive in started with an H – so we stuck to the Bee Law of naming the hives from the first letter of the place that they were caught!
Posted in Bee Lore, Bee Present, Beetwixt & Beetween on May 15, 2012| Leave a Comment »
Last week I bought (because I couldn’t rent it) the film by Sue Monk Kidd called “The Secret Life of Bees”. Here is her entry on Beelore and Symbol from her website <HERE> (which tells you more about the book and film). I love the idea that she wrote the book with a pot of honey which was an essential part of her continuing to write the book! Pure magic!
Bee lore goes back to ancient times, when bees were considered a symbol of the soul, of death and rebirth. I also discovered medieval hymns that referred to the Virgin Mary as the bee hive, and Christ as the honey that flowed from her. In some stories, the Virgin Mary was associated with the queen bee, and in ancient Greece the goddess Demeter was referred to as the queen bee, and her priestesses were the worker bees, who served her.
As the epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter in the novel suggest, I thought of the pink house in the novel as a kind of hive community. As for who the queen bee in the novel might be, I’ll let you come to your own conclusions. You might be as interested as I was, though, to learn that for a very long time, beekeepers assumed that the queen was a king. It wasn’t until 1609 that people began to seriously question the existence of king bees, thanks to Charles Butler who wrote a book called The Feminine Monarchie.
Long ago, honey was regarded as a magical, sacred substance. People were buried in it, not only because it was a preservative, but because “bee-balm” as it was called, was thought to contain a resurrection potency. It was one of the libations offered to the gods of Greece, and believed to be the food of poets and muses. I’ll tell you this much, I ate honey religiously while writing The Secret Life of Bees. For some reason writing about honey made me hungry for it. I kept a jar of it sitting right on my desk. One day when I completely ran out of it, I was overcome with the desire for biscuits and honey, and abruptly stopped writing, drove to the store and bought some. Actually, I do think the writing went better after that.”
Posted in Bee Lore, Bee Present on January 4, 2012| Leave a Comment »
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 23,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 9 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Posted in Bee Lore, Bee Present, Bee-ology, Beetwixt & Beetween on December 23, 2011| 1 Comment »
The singing bee comes like a little ship,
And docks beside a rose for cargoed wine,
Its gossamer paddles spinning in the air
A little plane upon the flower vine.
It anchors in the bell upon its quest,
And lulls its motor in the crimson bower,
Then with its honey glides on to the west,
A tiny airplane stealing off a flower.
.
Its paddles fan the wind in silver singing,
A boom of music down the garden dells;
The honey monoplane with motors ringing,
Its gauze propellers purring like soft bells;
And so it dips and soars and dives and noses,
A little ship among the summer roses.
.
by Edwin Curran (1892-????)
Posted in Bee Lore, Beekeeping, Beetwixt & Beetween on December 18, 2011| Leave a Comment »
“In 1822 the first hive bees were brought to this part of the world (Sydney), by a Captain Wallace, or Willis, in the ship “Isabella,” according to Haydon. From the bees thus introduced colonies were propagated and distributed inland. In the Government Gazette, of 21st June, 1822, there appeared this advertisement : — “Hive of bees for sale by Mr. Parr. Bees imported by Captain Wallace (or Willis).” In a number of the old Sydney Gazette, dated Friday, 1st November, 1822, there appears this paragraph: — “We congratulate our readersi upon the complete establishment of that most valuable insect, the bee, in this country. During the last three weeks three swarms of bees have been produced from two hives, the property of D. Wentworth, Esq., purchased by him from Captain Wallace, of the ‘Isabella,’ at his estate, Homebush, near Parramatta.”
“In the Sydney Morning Herald, of 10th August, 1863, it stated that at a meeting of the Acclimatisation Society of New South Wales, bees were first brought to this country by Captain Braidwood Wilson, from Hobart Town, in 1831. This was contradicted in a later issue of tTie same paper in these words: — “Bees were brought from England to Sydney in the year 1824, in the ship ‘Phoenix,’ which sailed from Portsmouth in March of that year.” This, too, is evidently a mistake, or perhaps another importation, as is evident from the fact that bees were advertised for sale in 1822, which has already been referred to. In 1840, a settler at Jervis Bay purchased two colonies of beef-‘, for which he paid £4, and engaged two aboriginals to carry the hives on their heads a distance of 40 miles. These were the black or English bees, sometimes termed the; German bee. For most of these dates and extracts I am indebted to Mr. S. M. Mowle, Usher of the Black Rod, of the Legislative Council, who married the only daughter of the late Captain Braidwood Wilson, R.N.”
From: Australian Bee Lore and Bee Culture by Albert Gale 1912.
Posted in Bee Lore, Bee Present, Bee-ology, Beetwixt & Beetween on June 25, 2011| 1 Comment »
What colors creatures see has long interested scientists, and aside from us, more is known about what colors bees see than any other living thing. Like us, bees are trichromatic. Whereas we base our color combinations on red, blue, and green, bees base all their colors on UV, blue , and green. Just as color blind people do not see red or green, and therefore experience the world of color differently, bees also perceive the world in colors entirely different from ours. Bees do not see red and have a hard time distinguishing it from surrounding green leaf backgrounds. Bees that frequent red flowers are either perceive them in color they can see, or the red flower is not being lost against a green background. Even though bees don’t see red, they can see other reddish wavelengths such as orange and yellow.
The light spectrum bees see is from 600 – 300 nm. The colors bees see are blue-green, blue, violet, and ultraviolet, with research showing our purple followed by our violet then our blue as their favorites. Mixing ultraviolet wavelengths with the wavelengths of colors they can and can’t see, gives bees a world of color different from our own. If deprived of UV light, bees lose interest in foraging, and remain in the hive until forced out by severe food shortages.
Bees not only see flowers in different colors than we do, bees also see ultra-violet light patterns, invisible to us, at the center that are a different color than the rest of the flower. From a bee’s-eye-view, the UV colors and patterns in a flower’s petals dramatically announce the flower’s stash of nectar and pollen. These UV patterns serve as a landing zone, guiding the bees to the nectar source.
|
we see
|
bees see
|
add in UV
|
| red | black | uv purple |
| orange | yellow/green* | |
| yellow | yellow/green* | uv purple |
| green | green | |
| blue | blue | uv violet |
| violet | blue | uv blue |
| purple | blue | |
| white | blue green | |
| black | black |
*even the experts don’t agree as to what colour the bee sees!
Article Source: http://www.westmtnapiary.com/Bees_and_color.html
Posted in Bee Lore, Bee Present, Beetwixt & Beetween on April 22, 2011| Leave a Comment »
The following animation takes my vote for the best animated bee movie ever:
Here is some background on Dot’s story (running away from her world as it is being destroyed – and saved by a bee!).
It also gives some great insights into the world’s smallest film (even though it is a subtle advert for Nokia mobile phones) and brings together cutting-edge medical technology with 3D printing. Totally awesome!
Posted in Bee Lore on January 2, 2011| Leave a Comment »
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.
A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.
The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 19,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 4 fully loaded ships.
In 2010, there were 21 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 207 posts. There were 13 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 3mb. That’s about a picture per month.
The busiest day of the year was November 1st with 197 views. The most popular post that day was St. Ambrose, Patron Saint of Beekeepers.
The top referring sites in 2010 were en.wikipedia.org, bee-hexagon.net, linkedin.com, facebook.com, and thebeespace.net.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for egyptian gods, melissae, aphrodite, top bar hive, and patron saint of beekeepers.
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
St. Ambrose, Patron Saint of Beekeepers March 2008
2 comments
Tears of Ra, the Sun god August 2007
5 comments
Symbol of the Bee on Napoleon I’s Coat of Arms January 2008
Aphrodite and her Melissae in Ancient Greece January 2008
9 comments
Beekeeping in Ancient Egypt February 2008
9 comments
Bee Lore 