The Beekeeping thread

[Taff]

As my beekeeping posts always seem to prompt a fair bit of interest, here's a thread to bring it all into one place and hopefully will take on a life of its own. I'll ramble on about what's going on in the apiary as the year goes on.

I think the first thing to say is that beekeeping is a craft and not a science, ask 4 beeks the same question and you'll get 6 replies and they'll all be right(ish), and what works for one person and their bees may not be the right thing for another. Every year I learn something new, something different happens and I have to scurry off to google or my text books.

here's a starter...

In a honey bee colony, there is 3 castes of bee.
The Queen, mother to all of the bees in the colony, there's usually only one but sometimes a mother and daughter queen can live side by side for some time.
The workers, female and 90% of the bees in the hive, they do everything other than lay eggs. If you see a honey bee on a flower then it will almost certainly be a female
Drones, males, do nothing other than eat & breed, if he's lucky...but that luck significantly shortens his life expectancy

[Le_Fromage_Grande]

What makes the worker bees female?

[Taff]

What makes the worker bees female?

This is one of the most amazing things about bees IMO.
in the first couple of weeks of a queen's life she mates with multiple drones and stores the sperm for life. she'll never mate again.

As the queen in preparing to lay an egg into a honeycomb cell, she'll measure the size of it with her front legs, a small cell = female worker, larger cell = drone.
as she pushes her backside down into the worker cell she releases sperm and the egg is fertilised so it grows into a female, but her reproductive organs don't develop fully
as she pushes her backside into the drone cell, no sperm is released so the egg grows into a drone.

[Mr. Dazzle]

So who decides how big the cells are?

[Taff]

So who decides how big the cells are?

the workers do everything, they produce wax from glands on their bodies and use it to build the comb, so during spring and early summer they'll make sure that about 10% or so of the cells available to the queen are drone

[KungFooBob]

Does she give each one a different name, cos that must be a nightmare, I'd just call them all Dave?

[Taff]

mine are all called Hillary

[MyLittleStudPony]

Don't they have an unusually high coefficient of relatedness (0.6 from memory...), as do many social hymenoptera; and this leads to many of their behavioural patterns?

[Ant]

Which bees give us honey? Honey Bees.

Which bees give us milk? Boo bees.

[Count Steer]

I've always been interested in keeping bees, my house in the UK is a 'working garden', we grow all sorts of fruit and veg, and I'd love a hive, I've got just the place for it too, but it would mean at times we'd be working within maybe 6-8ft of it tending to veggies or plants, and I worry that we'll get one of those mental hives that attacks if you get close.

I've thought about it, on an off, over the years but it was when we made friends with a local beekeeper that I decided no. It's quite a commitment but the thing that clinched it was seeing what happened and what she had to do when the Varroa mite struck that really made me realise how hard it can be. We did go to a place (for a special afternoon tea that we won in a raffle) with the same friends where they had a hive that they couldn't go near - but it turned out they'd stopped 'keeping' it some time ago and it was pretty much a wild hive and very aggressive. Taff will know better, obvs, but I don't think it's a problem with regularly tended hives.

[Mr. Dazzle]

Feels like something I'd do as part of a community project/group or something like that if I had the option.

[porter_jamie]

very cool - i heard that eating locally made honey helps with hayfever. anyone got any experience of this?

[Ant]

very cool - i heard that eating locally made honey helps with hayfever. anyone got any experience of this?

I have heard that the local stuff is the bees knees.

[gremlin]

very cool - i heard that eating locally made honey helps with hayfever. anyone got any experience of this?

Lots of evidence, which kinda makes sense, as you're micro-dosing pollen to build resistance.

I get mine from a local bloke just coz it tastes nice. Quite medicinal as opposed to bland sweetness. Is now a good time to tap him up for some or am I too early?

[Taff]

Backyard beekeeping is possible and many people do it, I only moved my bees out of our garden last year because we were have an extension built and wanted them out of the way.

But there is a down side, any colony can get grumpy and start chasing you at quite a distance from the hive. This will make your garden out of bounds for a while and if you back onto other peoples gardens they won’t thank you for getting stung.

Time wise, Beekeeping is a drain on your time between April and September, but only a couple of hours a week for inspections, extracting takes me a full weekend to do the house and equipment cleaning and extraction, and then a few evenings to jar and label the honey. And then there’s the never ending twisting of people’s arms to party with their hard earned money

[Taff]

very cool - i heard that eating locally made honey helps with hayfever. anyone got any experience of this?

Lots of evidence, which kinda makes sense, as you're micro-dosing pollen to build resistance.

I get mine from a local bloke just coz it tastes nice. Quite medicinal as opposed to bland sweetness. Is now a good time to tap him up for some or am I too early?

He may have some left over from last year's crop and if he hasn’t extracted spring honey then he may be planning to do it over the next few weeks if there’s enough there to take

[Mr. Dazzle]

very cool - i heard that eating locally made honey helps with hayfever. anyone got any experience of this?

Lots of evidence, which kinda makes sense, as you're micro-dosing pollen to build resistance.

It always sounds like bollox to me.

"Local" for a Bee and "Local" for me are completely different scales of number. I can jump in my car and get to the other side of the world, from a Bee's POV, in about 10 mins

[gremlin]

very cool - i heard that eating locally made honey helps with hayfever. anyone got any experience of this?

Lots of evidence, which kinda makes sense, as you're micro-dosing pollen to build resistance.

It always sounds like bollox to me.

"Local" for a Bee and "Local" for me are completely different scales of number. I can jump in my car and get to the other side of the world, from a Bee's POV, in about 10 mins

This is true. I was chatting to a colleague in Manchester who keeps bees and had a glut of honey. We discussed the benefits of local honey so I said I'd have some. He laughed and reminded me that Kent and Manchester cannot be considered in the sane location by any stretch of the imagination.

[Taff]

Lots of evidence, which kinda makes sense, as you're micro-dosing pollen to build resistance.

It always sounds like bollox to me.

"Local" for a Bee and "Local" for me are completely different scales of number. I can jump in my car and get to the other side of the world, from a Bee's POV, in about 10 mins

This is true. I was chatting to a colleague in Manchester who keeps bees and had a glut of honey. We discussed the benefits of local honey so I said I'd have some. He laughed and reminded me that Kent and Manchester cannot be considered in the sane location by any stretch of the imagination.

This is defo a yeah but no but yeah but no

Right now blackberry is in flower in Gloucester and I strongly suspect it is in Manchester as well, further north may be a week behind but it’ll broadly be the same time.
Same with trees like horse chestnut, lime, hazel etc etc, they’ll all be producing pollen roughly at the same time give or take a week.

Where it’ll differ is farmland areas that are planted with huge fields of mono crop, the pollen in the air will be very different locally.

[Le_Fromage_Grande]

Eating honey seems to help with my hay fever, but for me it doesn't have to be local, any honey seems to work