Anyway, by this stage it was half past four and Mum said that we should find someone to take the bees away. She suggested that I ring the local butchers shop as they sold local honey. Not my first thought of action, but a sensible one. Mum always had sensible ideas in an emergency. The butcher gave us the name of a local beekeeper who answered their phone straight away. It was a quietly spoken woman. I explained what the situation was and she said: “I’ll be over right away. It should take me about 20 minutes”.
Archive for the ‘Beekeeping’ Category
Honey for Sale!
Posted in Bee Present, Beekeeping, Bylaugh on December 13, 2007| 2 Comments »
Bee Diseases – Nothing New!
Posted in Bee Lore, Beekeeping on November 13, 2007| Leave a Comment »
Bee-keeping shows up in Greek mythology. Aristaeus, apparently the dicsoverer of beekeeping (https://beelore.com/2007/07/22/aristaeus-discoverer-of-beekeeping/) lost his hives to disease. He compelled Proteus (a shape-changer, who was also the wise god of the sea) to tell him how to avoid such a loss in the future.
Apparently more diseases have been described for honey bees than any other insects. The earliest written descriptions were made by Aristotle around 325 B.C.
From: http://casswww.ucsd.edu/personal/ron/CVNC/byline/bugs_96mar.html
Was You Ever Bit by a Dead Bee?
Posted in Bee Lore, Bee Present, Bee-ology, Beekeeping, Beetwixt & Beetween on November 9, 2007| 1 Comment »
Eddie: Say, was you ever bit by a dead bee?
Beauclerc: I have no memory of ever being bitten by any kind of bee.
Slim: Were you?
Eddie: You’re all right lady. You and Harry’s the only one that ever—
Harry: Don’t forget Frenchy.
Eddie: That’s right. You and Harry and Frenchy. You know you gotta be careful of dead bees, if you go around barefooted. Cause if you step on ‘em they can sting ya just as bad as if they was alive, especially is they was kinda mad when they got killed. I bet I been bit a hundred times that way.
Slim: You have. Why don’t you bite them back?
Eddie: That’s what Harry always says. But I ain’t got no stinger.
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From: “To Have and Have Not” (1944).
By: Jules Furthman (1888–1960), U.S. screenwriter, William Faulkner (1897–1962), U.S. author, screenwriter, and Howard Hawks.
With: Eddie (Walter Brennan), Beauclerc (Paul Marion), Slim/Marie Brown (Lauren Bacall), Harry Morgan (Humphrey Bogart)
By answering Eddie’s nonsensical question correctly, Slim earns entree into Harry’s and Eddie’s tight-knit group.
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I once met a beekeeper who said it was possible to inject sufferers of arthritis with stings from dead bees to help ease the ailment. However, I have never tried it! Odd as it seems, dead bees can sting you – particularly if , like Eddie, you tread on hundreds of them with bare feet!
The End of a Bee’s Life
Posted in Bee Law, Bee Lore, Bee Present, Bee-ology, Beekeeping, Beetwixt & Beetween on October 19, 2007| Leave a Comment »
“Most of the bees come to their end in the open fields. With wings frayed from the winds the summer workers reach the limit of their strength and expire. Bees that die within the hive are carried outside by the workers – yet this is a rare occurrence. As many observers have reported, dying bees will use their last remaining strength to creep beyond the landing board. A Law of the insect city apparently leads the exhausted bees to leave the interior of the hive and so save their fellow workers the task of removing their bodies. The queen seems to be guided by the same instinct, leaving the hive when her end is near. For cleanliness is one of the unwritten laws of the insect city. It is inherent in the bees. ”
From: ‘The Golden Throng’ by Edwin Way Teale – republished by Alpha Books of Dorset in 1968.
Bee Afraid, Bee Very Afraid!
Posted in Bee Lore, Bee Present, Beekeeping on October 19, 2007| 1 Comment »
They’ve built barriers, shone flashlights and even burned their rubber-soled shoes. yet try as they might, African farmers struggle to keep elephants from trampling their land and destroying their crops.
The answer, finally, may be found in the sound of a swarm of buzzing bees. “They really bolted,” says Lucy King at the University of Oxford, whose team played 4-minute recordings of bees to 17 herds of elephants in the Buffalo Springs and Samburo national reserves in Kenya. “One herd even ran across a river to get away.”
King successfully deterred 16 of the 17 herds by playing them recordings from speakers hidden in a portable fake tree trunk. Some herds put more than 100 metres between them and the buzz. The average “safe” distance for the elephants was 64 metres, compared with just 20 metres to avoid white noise (Current Biology, vol 17, p R832).
King decided to act after hearing that elephants avoid trees containing beehives. One game warden told her of seeing a large bull elephant being stung up its trunk. “It went completely beserk, apparently,” she says.
Although the recordings work well, the equipment needed to play it is expensive. King believes a cheaper, more sustainable solution is to use real beehives, with the honey they supply providing additional food and income for farmers. She is conducting field trials using real hives to discover what effect they have on elephants, and just how sweet the benefits are for farmers.
From: New Scientist, 13 October 2007, page5
The Edinburgh Beekeeper’s Funeral
Posted in Bee Lore, Bee Present, Beekeeping, Beetwixt & Beetween on September 24, 2007| 2 Comments »
I have a very old friend who lives in Scotland. He told me of an uncle of his who used to keep bees in his roof garden in Edinburgh. Unfortuately, his uncle died and the day of his dead uncle’s funeral, arrangements were made for a hearse to take his body to the local church. The story goes that the bees swarmed and followed the hearse down the road to the church. What a beautiful send-off from the bees!
Swarm Settles on a Horse!
Posted in Bee Lore, Bee Present, Beekeeping on September 24, 2007| Leave a Comment »
When we moved into our new cottage, we soon met the neighbours. One neighbour told us of an old lady who has kept bees for over forty years who lives a bit further up the lane. One day her bees swarmed into the next door field and settled……….on a white horse – owned by our neighbour! The swarm then left the horse and finally settled in a tree. The old lady (a bit younger then) caught the swarm and put it back into one of her hives. Quite extraordinary! I have heard of swarms settling in many strange places – but never on a horse! When I finally met the old lady, she was not aware the bees had settled on the horse. Perhaps it is just a good story! Who knows?
The Wax Mistress’ Secret
Posted in Bee Present, Beekeeping on September 24, 2007| Leave a Comment »
At the weekend, our local beekeeping group held their annual honey show. I met a very interesting lady who was the “wax mistress” – with some beautiful exhibits made from beeswax. I was intrigued to know how to separate wax from honey and pollen – as I have a whole load of this mixture that I have collected over the past year from the hive and from the honey extracting process. She told me one of her tricks. She advised me to put the wax in a baker’s tin which has the bottom cut out – and to line the tin with lint (from the chemists), fuzzy side up. The lint is kept in place with a piece of string. The baker’s tray is then hung from the top rack of your oven with a wire coat hanger. Below is the collecting tray or bowl – which has a small amount of rainwater in the bottom to stop the wax from sticking. The oven is set at 50 degrees Centigrade and the wax should melt through the lint and into the collecting tray, floating on top of the rainwater. This all sounds quite obvious once you hear it – but would take ages of trial-and-error to come up with it from scratch.
The Magic of Drone Congregation Areas
Posted in Bee Present, Beekeeping, Beetwixt & Beetween on September 17, 2007| Leave a Comment »
One of the most intriguing things that I have learnt about bees is the unexplainable magic of drone congregation areas. Why magic? On lazy-hazy sunny days, year after year, genration after generation, drones will congregate in particular areas to wait for any passing queens that need mating. Yet how do the drones know where these areas are when when old drones are kicked out of the hives in Autumn and a new generation of drones only reappear the next year when the queen starts laying new drones in the Spring?
Drones being pushed out of the hive in Autumn
Geographic knowledge passed on from one generation of drones to the next without direct communication – as if by magic! Perhaps the same magic that birds use generation-after-generation to migrate from one part of the world to another?
Egg Laying Machine!
Posted in Bee Present, Bee-ology, Beekeeping on September 17, 2007| Leave a Comment »
A queen bee, the mother of all bees in the hive, will lay an average of 1500 eggs in a day!
Bee Lore 
