On 11/14/07 10:33 PM, in article snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com, "Jangchub" wrote: snip
Sometimes you lose the list, sometimes the list is obsolete before you get to the store And sometimes you get the call telling you DS just finished the milk you needed for dinner.
But I don't send the whole trip on the phone and certainly not when I'm checking out. Especially when it's the cute kid that cards me for the wine... ;)
C"Ted Mittelstaedt" expounded:
Small cell. Right now the standard foundation is 5.4 mm, the bees naturally make brood comb in 4.9 or smaller, sometimes. It's an interesting experiment, I know of beeks who have been either using small cell foundation or foundationless frames (allowing them to build whatever size they desire) and they've had good success with it. The smaller cells aren't favorable for the varroa to infest. Another way of controlling varroa is to use drone cell foundation (much larger, I forget the size, but it's bigger than 5.4). The varroa prefer the day or so longer brood time for drones, as well as the extra room. You allow the drones to almost mature, then pull the frame and stick it in the freezer. Kills drones and varroa. Just put it back in and the bees clean it all up to use again. Amazing little girls!
Scott Hildenbrand expounded:
That's good
No, I didn't say that. They need the hive, they need to work. They have designated jobs throughout their short lives. The field bees that are out gathering are on their last job - they literally wear their wings out bringing back stores for the hive.
Bee bread is extremely important to them. It's being discussed right now in Bee Culture, we need fat bees going into the winter - they have the longest life, winter bees, they raise the spring brood and need good nutrition to last through the cold seasosn.
Ann wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
on that note, is there a way to encourage wild hives to take up residence? would the wandering new queen be looking for a particular type of spot? i'm in the process of logging the back 20, & we're putting it into managed woodlands with the intent to encourage wildlife (i have at least one female Blanding's turtle of breeding size back there). what that means is that we will be leaving certain deadwood trees & snags standing for bugs & birds. if there's a particular type of dead or damaged tree that might attract bees i can make sure it gets marked to be left alone. lee
Jim wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@bellsouth.net:
why? bumblebees are very laid back & passive. you can pick them up if you do it slowly as not to startle them & they will crawl on your hands. another good pollinator bee is the Orchard bee. i have lots of those around & one of my winter projects will be building orchard bee condos (they live in little holes, so a chunk of wood with a grid of holes hanging on a tree or the side of a building near the gardens pleases them) lee
We're being facetious. Chemophobia in garden groups is something that first pops up. Latest theory is that there is a virus doing this but cell phones, chemicals, global warming etc were blamed. "You can't beat Mother Nature" ;) Frank
Ok.. That was on the lines of my whole point to begin with, that they can't survive without the hive and are indeed dieing off.
You're packed full of information on bees, do you keep them? Always wanted to just for the fun factor more than anything.
We're going to seed the yard with clover this spring and I've got tons of planting to do to improve the yard.. It's funny though since we live in front of a sub devision.. They all have 'lawns'.. I like to pick the dandelions and blow them their direction.. ;)
Scott Hildenbrand expounded:
Yes, we've got hives here, at my mother's a few towns over, and at our home up in Maine. It is fun, fascinating, and the honey I get from my gardens is fantastic - a mixture of whatever they find in the wild and the herbs and flowers I've got all over. Haven't extracted the honey from the hives in Maine, that's a project for this weekend.
I've let the dandelions go wild in the backyard, they're everywhere, but it turns out they aren't a great nectar source - they do bloom before most everything else, so they're worth having, but just until other blooms start. The protein in the pollen is incomplete, too. I guess no one told the girls that, however, they seem to love the dandies!
I was reading something in one of the "Mother Country Backwoods Grit News" magazines about, by breeding the ferocity out of bees, we've also bred out their ability to fight back against mites, etc.
Wandering queens do like to settle in places that have held bees previously.
enigma expounded:
Got any hollow trees? Actually, you can put up swarm boxes and use lemon balm rubbed inside to attract swarms in season, usually mid to late spring. Then have a complete hive ready to put them in. Swarms are kinda neat, they tend to not sting (that's not an absolute) because they've engorged themselves wit honey and can't bend to insert the stinger - also, they have no home to defend, their only concern is finding a new home for themselves and their all-important queen..
Anyways, become a beekeeper, it's fun, it goes nicely with gardening and farming, and the honey (which is really the secondary economic use of honeybees, pollination is the first) is a wonderful byproduct.
doofy expounded:
The Africanized bees deal with them well, it has to do with the length of the brood cycle, the AFH's brood time is shorter, so the varroa don't have time to mature before the new bee hatches. We may have bread the ferocity out of the bees, or we may have continued lines of bees that can't withstand and/or deal with the varroa, but that's changing, hygenic bees are being bred that both groom the varroa off better and that kill and remove infested pupa, thus controlling the mites themselves. As I said in another post, another point of view is to not treat at all, and let the susceptible bees die off, hopefully encouraging natural selection to let the stronger bee develop (not economically feasible if your income depends on bees). There's quite a bit going on in the honeybee world, it's a small world, but many are trying to make things right.
Passive just as long as you don't accidentally disturb their nest site, then they will gladly take chase for a 100 feet or so to sting with the best of their smaller cousins.
Lar
Would it make sense to install a hive, bring in some bees, and just leave it alone, not harvesting honey or wax -- just give them a place to live and to pollinate the area?
cheers
oz
Nicotinoids were one of the early thought culprits... There is a paper out there somewhere that came out this past September from Pennsylvania State University showing common genetic tags from numerous CCD effected hives across the US and a samples from Australia of a rather new virus called Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IVAP), first detected in 2002-03. The US started allowing importation of Australian bees in late
2004/early 2005.Lar
[....]
good question as well as a good observation concerning the character of this particular species of bee. they are rather good natured and have exhibited the most civilized mannerisms of all the different bee types I'm familiar with.
a speculation on my part would be, maybe the honey is not the most desirable?
'if' your why was more directed towards my having used the zoom on the camera? the use had more to do with my desire to obtain a clear close-up picture by working within the constraints of the technical limits where the camera's ability to focus is restricted by the movement of the subject matter at distances of less then one foot. in other words, the wind was blowing and the bush was moving and the bees were flying in and out as well.
took me awhile to learn how to use that camera. my most recent accomplishment was learning how to set the camera to capture a picture of me using an arc welder. in my previous attempts, my failure to understand aperture settings in conjunction with shutter speeds had spoiled the outcome. setting a goal and then obtaining it is often a rewarding experience.
each year during the summer, down at the barn, the boring bees show up and bore the most perfectly round holes in the rafters of the shelter. I don't think I could drill a hole anymore perfectly round than they can. they look in appearance just like the ones in the pictures I posted the link towards and in no way resemble the species known as the carpenter bee who gains the name as a result of their boring in wood to create their homes.
best 2U Lee, Jim
There's tons of feral hives in the Portland metro area. There's a lot of people that track the locations of fruit trees in Portland, there are hundreds if not thousands of apple, plum and pear trees and this year we had an excellent pear and plum harvest from them, as well as apples. We have a hibiscus and apple in our yard ( the apple is young and isn't producing yet) and I was watching the bees visiting the hibiscus all summer. You can bet that there are no commercial beekeepers who are going around making sure the fruit trees in the downtown area are being pollenated! I also bought fruit from several hobby farmers in the outer metro area and none of them paid for beekeepers but they all saw plenty of bees this summer.
Ted
My money is on nature. My armchair quarterbacking is that since so many commercial beekeepers are buying queens that there is likely only a handful of suppliers who are breeding and boxing up queens, and a few of them have a problem - they got themselves a genetic defect or some such that has infested their production hives and nobody is willing to publically admit it because they don't want their business to collapse.
Sooner or later once enough data is gathered, they will trace it down to a cause, by then my guess is the queen suppliers will have a fix applied and you will see a bunch of stonewalling and denials from the industry, and it will be back to business as usual.
Ted
Jim expounded:
As Lar said, they're good-natured as long as you don't disturb their nest. Then they'll chase you down for quite a distance! And they don't die when they sting you, they live to do it again.
It's as tasty as honeybee honey, but it's stored in a much different manner, and they don't stockpile it the way honeybees do, so harvesting it is much more difficult.
MajorOz expounded:
It would be an interesting experiment.
Some of the beeks in our club have had hives that have lasted five or six years that haven't been treated-those would be good hives to take splits from. That's what you want to look for, a local beek who has had his hives live through several winters or more. Catching a swarm would be good, but you have no idea where that swarm came from unless there's someone nearby keeping bees - even then there's no guarantee.
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