Professor David Evans is a virologist studying the biology of single stranded positive sense RNA viruses, including poliovirus, hepatitis C virus and deformed wing virus of honeybees. He has a fascinating, practical beekeeping blog, https://www.theapiarist.org/
- Miticides are not inexpensive, until you compare them to the cost of replacement bees and lost honey production. Not treating is both false economy and tempting fate but, with coordination and advance planning, savings can be made.
- Brood breaks created by queen caging allow miticides to be applied to broodless colonies. Could high mite/virus levels mid-season help select for resistance or tolerance mechanisms, without detrimental effects on colonies?
- In the apiary, every day is Judgement Day. Good judgement involves ample information, some insightful interpretation, and understanding. Bad judgement involves a lack of information, guesswork, wishful thinking and sentimentality.
- Honey labelling involves an interesting combination of market research, design, information transfer and selling regulations, coupled with consideration of the label and printing costs. How can you create small (or large) numbers of labels flexibly and economically?
- More on collecting and hiving swarms, their memory, how and when to treat them for mites, and a Citizen Science survey of whether swarm absconding might be due to scout bee activity.
- We can now add 'faster honey ripening' to the known benefits of using drone comb in honey supers, though whether these outweigh the consequences of a queen getting above the excluder is debatable.
- You should learn from your mistakes or — in this case — mine. What to do with your feet when mishandling queens, how to retrieve the queen from a full box of brace comb, and (What? You want more?) comments on setting up and siting bait hives.
- Not all plastic queen cups that look the same perform the same, and different commercial plastic queen cups can profoundly affect the success of queen rearing. Do the dimensions of the cell cup influence the size of the resulting queen?
- It's expensive to start beekeeping. Buy wisely. You don't need most things the suppliers sell. Price is not necessarily the best indicator of suitability. Compatibility, future-proofing and longevity are far more important.
- Honey bees may voluntarily leave the hive and not return when their health is compromised. This altruistic suicide is a form of social immunity and has evolved to protect the colony from infectious disease.
Swarm Season is here!