 Bees working in Red Flowering Gum As of late January 2012, there a several species of flowering eucalypts that our bees are working. North of the Divide, Yellow Box (Eucalyptus melliodora) is still flowering heavily and has been going since late November. Red Stringybark (E. macrorhyncha) is well budded and due to start flowering any day now, this tree provides good pollen and nectar for the bees. Candlebark (E. rubida) has commenced flowering and provides good pollen for the bees and a clear honey similar to Manna Gum (E. viminalis). Grey Box (E. microcarpa) is now showing good budding for autumn flowering.
 Beetles in Red Flowering Gum South of the Divide, our bees are presently working Messmate Stringybark (E. obliqua) and the start of the Silverleaf Stringybark (E. cephalocarpa) flowering which should last through autumn along with the autumn flowering Swamp Gum (E. ovate) which is well budded at present.
Planted ornamental trees are also flowering – in parks and gardens, you will see Red Flowering Gum (Corymbia ficifolia formerly Eucalyptus ficifolia) is in full flower and, as well as looking great, nectar loving insects and birds are going for it.
 Students searching for signs of brood On the 7th January, 2012, we conducted our first beekeeping lesson for beginners. Our students were very enthusiastic and the day seemed to fly by.
The weather held out and it was almost perfect conditions for opening up the hives in the afternoon after a pleasant lunch. Our students, to their delight, viewed brood in many stages and spotted the queen numerous times. Our hives were all in good condition (most have been re-queened) however because of the inclement weather over December/early Jan, we discovered that almost all of them required feeding. All in all, it was a really successful and enjoyable day.
One student, Susie, is an avid blogger and wrote about her day with us and has kindly shared her experience. To see Susie’s thoughts you can visit her blog.
There is an interesting taster article (and ensuing discussion) on a new caste of soldier bees in a stingless bee of South America – the Jatai bee (Tetragonisca angustula).
Soldier bees guard their nest against attack by robbers
The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that Jatai soldiers are 30% heavier than their forager nestmates, have larger legs and relatively smaller heads.
Whats interesting is that this is the first known incidence of a soldier caste in bees – ants and other super-organism species have specialist solder castes but it had yet to be seen in bees.
Evolution is a wonderful (in the true sense of the word) phenomenon.
In the honey bee (in our hives - Apis melifera), the role of hive protection is undertaken by the worker bees who will sting intruders as a form of defense, and alarmed bees will release a pheromone that stimulates an attack response in other bees. Some honey bees species also use a ‘mob’ tactic where they crowd around an intruder (particularly wasps) in a ball. The ensuing heat and, possibly, carbon dioxide kill the intruder. They also use this ‘ball of bees’ tactic to starve/kill a queen to be superseded.
Further Links (based on Wikipedia):
C. H. Thawley. “Heat tolerance as a weapon”.
Michio Sugahara & Fumio Sakamoto (2009). “Heat and carbon dioxide generated by honeybees jointly act to kill hornets”. Naturwissenschaften 96 (9): 1133–6.
Victora Gill (July 3, 2009). “Honeybee mobs overpower hornets”. BBC News.
I hate hackers with a passion now.
Our website was hacked five times over the last six months – the most recent being today – leading to drastic measures including a complete reset.
It’s just so senseless.
My deepest thanks go to my bro – Rob – who has been helping us with the wordpress side of the site – and has patiently helped us rebuild the site each time its been hacked.
hopefully – we have now plugged whatever hole was letting the b’stards in!
I received a phone call last week from a man from country Victoria who stated that he wanted to ask a few questions about organic honey. He said he bought a jar of certified organic honey for a premium price from the health food shop in his town and was shocked to find,in small print at the bottom of the label, a statement that said that: This product may contain traces of nuts!!
He said that he is allergic to peanuts and therefore could not possibly eat the honey. He also said that he originally lived in Oregon U.S.A and that standards for organic foods there are very strict and this sort of thing would never be allowed there. He stated that he believed that organic standards are inadequate in Australia and asked to buy some organic honey directly from the beekeeper.
The problem here is that packers are allowed to be certified organic and buy in honey to pour into their own jars using equipment that has been tainted by other products.
It is probably best to buy your honey from beekeepers who harvest the honey from their own hives.
Yellow Gum or Eucalyptus leucoxylon has been flowering throughout the winter in the northern country of Victoria where we have some hives. It has been yielding nectar freely and is expected to flower until the end of November.
Last week I visited the hives and found that each one had up to three boxes full of honey. I have extracted the honey this week and have been very happy with the heaviness of each frame and the consistency of the honey.
It is gratifying to have a Spring yield of honey and is due to the increased rainfall of the past season. Yellow box is now flowering and hopefully, along with some Blue gum will refill the stickies when placed on the hives. This all remains to be seen because, as they say, don’t count your honey until it is in the shed!
This spring around Melbourne has seen a quite severe cold snap having a detrimental effect on our beehives. Queens have produced a lot of brood in October and the cold and windy weather into November has stopped the field bees from flying and so, instead of gathering pollen and nectar, bees have been eating into their stores in the hive. Hives have lost a lot of weight and some are barely making it while some swarms collected recently have not survived.
Our bees in the north of the state have been doing much better because it has been warmer during the day and there has been less rain and more time for bees to fly. Hopefully after the warmer temperatures expected next weekend the season will finally begin.
We have hives on the Silvertop eucalyptus at the moment and a few weeks ago we thought we were in for a good crop of choice spring honey. The hives came out of winter in good condition and the nearby hillside was white with eucalypts flowering. It has been so cold and wet recently that hives are losing weight rather than gaining it. Foiled by the Spring Dwindle again!
This morning we picked up a post bag containing 15 Italian queens from our local post office. They came in the little queen cages which are about the size of a matchbox and contain a young queen and about a half dozen workers as attendants.
We immediately went to our home bee yard and started searching for the old queens we wished to replace. The first few hives were swarms which were collected in the past few weeks and had good brood in the middle frames. The frames consisted of newly drawn out foundation and so were clean and white and the queens were relatively easy to spot and remove so that the new queen cage could be placed on top of the frames.
The next few hives were more populous and had many dark bees and dark queens which can be difficult to see against the masses of workers. We got lucky and did pretty well and had to leave about four hives overall because we simply couldn’t find the queen after a certain amount of time.We always order less queens than the number of hives present in a yard so that we can move on to the next hive if necessary.
We can always go back to those later on and eventually win out and find the queen but occasionally we give up on some because the queen is really good at hiding. We could find her if we were desperate by forcing all the bees through a queen excluder, but usually we just admit defeat.
Anyway the new queens are all in and we won’t disturb the hive in any way for at least 11 days so that the bees don’t kill the new queens and accept them.
There is a perception among beekeepers that commercially bred queen bees are essential to achieve very populous colonies and therefore large yields of honey. This is not necessarily always the case because local bees which are endemic to an area for several generations can also be very successful.
Colonies which have been hived from swarms from tree trunks and cavities within buildings are known as feral bees.
These bees are adapted to their local conditions and react differently to commercially bred colonies. I have found in the past that colonies with a bought queen will build up their numbers very quickly when the weather warms up after the winter and if there is a nectar flow will exploit it efficiently. However, when conditions deteriorate, these colonies can build up too quickly and starve during a cold spring,whereas the local queens will lay less at the start of spring and only reach full capacity when conditions are suitable.
Last season I took 20 newly hived feral swarms collected from Melbourne suburbs to a forest site in West Gippsland and left them to forage on a Messmate Stringybark flow followed by Silverleaf Stringybark and Mountain Grey Gum in the autumn. All of these Eucalyptus species produce excellent pollen and copious nectar when conditions are favorable. The colonies built up into very populous hives and produced as much honey as commercially bred bees would have.
I am not suggesting here that beekeepers do not use well bred queens, indeed I prefer to use them for several reasons including the fact that they have a lovely calm temperament and are a pleasure to work with. The feral bees can be more feisty and would be difficult to handle by inexperienced apiarists.
The main point I am making is that what determines success in harvesting a crop of honey is conditions,conditions, conditions.
Yesterday I read an article in the Melbourne Age that gave me optimism about the future survival of the honeybee. Jaqueline McGlade, executive director of the European Environmental Agency says that our cities have the potential to become a major supplier of honey. “City honey is cleaner than country honey because there are fewer pesticides”, she said. This really makes sense to me because crops on farms in the countryside are essentially monocultures and therefore, the variety of pollens available to the bees is limited, and the chemicals sprayed on the crops can contaminate the honey.
More and more people in Europe are keeping bees in their backyards and on their roofs and this trend is also occurring in Melbourne. As I have previously stated, the conditions for pollen and nectar are conducive to success in producing a healthy food source close to home in the city.
A gathering of chefs and scientists recently in Copenhagen tried to solve the world’s food problems in a weekend. The basic conclusion that they came to is that food needs to be sourced close to home and that that there are many food sources that are not being used because people, in general, prefer convenience over actively seeking out food.
The trend towards utilizing the massive resources available to the honeybee in our cities is a great portent for our future.
|
|
Recent Comments