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BB king week 3

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  BB KING   Harps Don't think we can use them until July though because the queen is pretty big (as are the drones) and she could get zapped if she was doing her mating flight. Not sure. Place in garden again ...Bee basics Are All Bees Female? Not all bees are female. There are three types of honey bees within a hive: the queen, the workers, and the drones. A queen bee is the only female bee in the hive that gets to reproduce. Worker bees are all female, and are all offspring of the queen. But there are males in the hive called drones. Drones fly off to reproduce with other young queens who will start a new colony. There are three types of honey bee within every hive: workers, drones, and a queen. The workers and the queen are female. Queens are reproductive and are larger than the workers. The drones are male, have much larger compound eyes, and do not have stingers.   There seem to be plenty of parallels with human society here. What kind of bee are YOU? To the bee spec...
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Week 2

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      Bee late. Still waiting for the bees and the hives. Still waiting for the electric hornet killers (death metal band). Still preparing.  More prep Working my way through this tome. I think I'm going to need a "beekeeping for extra stupid dummies". This one is about 350 pages long. Very good though. It explains that a billion things can go wrong and probably will. ...More optimistically There are already tonnes of bumble bees hanging around. Must be a good sign. Good weather. Excited.  Can't really see any bees in this pic, but I imagine they might be quite happy around here. The hives themselves have to go on stands. They shouldn't sit on the ground.  Hive stands Very rough and ready. A couple of old window shutters sitting on cinder blocks. Have to make sure they are level with the horizon (although they might not look like that from the photo). They should be tilted ever so slightly forward though, to make sure any water drains out of the hives. (No ...
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Bee experiment Week one 24/4

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    Bee Prepared. We have decided to get two beehives complete with bees for the bottom of the garden. I say "we" because I expect to fail spectacularly, or at least abjectly. We fail but I succeed.  Problems I know little or nothing about bees. We have two dogs who eat everything they can't destroy. There are a few houses pretty near to us. Asian hornets (velutinas) think our garden is paradise. They prey on bees. Varoa, a bee disease is rife. ...More optimistically We have a big garden with lots of flowers. We have a lot of love to give the bees. Er....nothing else Preparation 1. Establish where we are going to put the hives: This is right at the back of the garden. So, my idea is to put them here. At least 30m away from any houses, but still close to where the dogs run about. 2. Buy electrical fence thingies to fry the Asian hornets.  3. Put out a lot of home-made traps to catch the velutinas. Basically made from plastic bottles with beer inside. Must be Estrella....
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