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/
- Competition between honey bees and other pollinators is often indirect, time- and location-specific. In contrast, pollen theft by honey bees is direct, and may be more common than we thought. Beekeepers need to engage more with the contradictory studies on competition with other pollinators.
- Why don't foragers collect as much as they can carry when foraging, and why aren't they damaged when crash landing back at the hive entrance? Forager longevity, lead backpacks, kinetic energy and a brief discussion about dropping mice down mineshafts.
- It's a good time to tidy and secure all the spare boxes, boards, queen excluders, roofs, and frames that have accumulated during the season. Winter storms, rodents, and wax moths will otherwise make a real mess of them … which you'll have to clean up next year.
- When and why you should treat with oxalic acid after late-summer use of Apivar. With resistance increasing, an alternate treatment — applied in a timely manner (so not 'sometime in winter') — helps minimise mite levels for the following season.
- The winter may feel never-ending, but in person and online talks offer the opportunity to improve your understanding, learn something new, and make the 'off season' seem just a little shorter.
- It might be possible to create pesticides repellent to honey bees that reduce the accumulation of the sub-lethal chemicals that have a long-term detrimental impact on colony health.
- Some equinoctial thoughts on success and failure in beekeeping, and attempts to understand my woefully poor queen mating this year. Mating occurs in drone congregation areas (DCAs) … or does it? A recent review questions the evidence supporting the role for DCAs in queen mating.
- Looked after properly, beekeeping equipment should last for years. Looked after improperly, it will need to be repaired … but will also last for years. Here are some fixes to major damage and minor holes in poly hives, and repairs/rebuilds of two essential pieces of equipment.
- Tropilaelaps in Turkey, recent studies of the complexity of the waggle dance, and (yet more studies on) the influence of queen cup size on the size of the resulting queens. Bigger is not always better.
- Why choose fondant, where to buy it, and how to use it. Save money by using fondant to feed your bees in autumn, and — perhaps more important — make your beekeeping easier.