The sewing stuff yes but bone/wooden combs? I can see that being of interest to many people who may like to see before they buy.
As for dipped candles thats a mass market item. OK you say (here) you'll send pictures to anyone who asks but I didn't see that on your site and it's making your potential buyer jump through a hoop that other sites don't. Which one are they most likely to buy from the one where they can see the product or the one where they can't...
A second look shows that you are into authentic reproduction for your articals, but remember many people may find your site from a google search, indeed guess who has the first two hits from "beeswax candlemaker"...
I doubt it, we've never yet sold one to an OMP even when they've been able to see and handle them. They really are very specialised.
other sites don't.
Ah, but how many other sites in UK - or anywhere - offer what we do? When you're unique and people have been searching for what you offer they'll jump through any hoop - and enjoy it. We're not talking about impulse buying here.
In truth there IS another UK site which offers needles, pins and hooks and eyes and shows pictures of them. They are far more expensive than in our list - and they are made by us - we sell them to that supplier (a great friend) at the price in our list. See
formatting link
:-)
In the above case they have the choice of paying more for what they can see (and we have exactly the same return but in advance) or paying less and trusting us. We have a reputation to maintain, it's a very good reputation.
No idea - but I suspect it's a US company which doesn't specialise in period candles.
And we have sent them to USA, despite telling enquirers that they can get similar ones there or make their own. I even send instructions, free, on line. They still order ours - because of our reputation.
Some things are more important than bulk sales. We're too old to want to expand and have to employ people and have all our time taken by our hobby. Gini at Chimera is like that and while she loves what she does she's worn to a frazzle and has lots of outworkers, that's not for us.
We're also control freaks, we need to know that what we offer is absolutely our own work :-))))))))
"stuart noble" in flower. Is it the fragrance that attracts them?
Not all flowers produce nectar, bees (and other insects) are attracted to nectar because they need the energy food - the sugars.
I'm not at all sure about fragrance but there is another attraction - which humans can't normally experience. Some flowers (I don't know about skimmia, I'm not a garden flower person) don't look to bees and other insects as they do to us. Our eyes can only detect a certain range of wave lengths, there are others and bees etc. can 'see' (for want of a better word) colours at the ultra-violet end of the scale (they can't 'see' colours at the infra red end). Under certain conditions - 'black light' is it? - these 'colours' show and it can clearly be seen that the patches of those colours guide the insects directly to the base of the flower, where the nectaries are. The nectaries are the organs which exude nectar.
I guess that on Monday it was warm, it wasn't dry and that the bush was producing nectar.
Being attractive to insects can't be just a function of scent though because some flowers don't have scents. Or none that we can detect.
So saying, some plants produce 'extra floral' nectar - nothing to do with the flowers and with no guides we know of. You will sometimes see insects - especially social wasps - near the base of the underside of laurel leaves. There are two small openings which exude efn - a form of sap - and how the insects know about them I don't kno. We can smell laurel leaves even without crushing them, the efn is so weak that we can hardly taste it, yet the insects flock to it.
Bees and mammals are very, very different and not only in their physiology and natural history. They rely on different wave lengths for their sight, they communicate by chemicals rather than noise - and probably by vibrations too and they are cold blooded yet need heat to function .... We can't compare our existences in any way except that we share the planet.
I'm not preaching!
Mammals and plants and birds and reptiles are all wonderful too, every single cell in any living creature is so complex as to be beyond our normal understanding.
If the beekeeping bug gets hold of you it's very difficult to tear yourself away. There's so much to learn and so many delightful experiences and excitements. That's probably true of very many activities but I do think that beekeeping is rather special among all the others. And I've done all sorts of things in my life!
I've been to lots of funerals of very old people - last Monday I went to a
91 year old's. I don't know if he still had bees because he'd moved to the north a few weeks ago but he would still have called himself a beekeeper and still took part in activities. He first had bees in his teens and won a prize at a National Honey Show at the Crystal Palace in the 1920s. Most beekeepers don't just give up, it seems to have a hold on them. I've given up actually having bees but I still read the bee press, attend beekeeping events and use the products of my hives (honey and wax don't spoil if cared for properly). Honeybees have given me very many friends, the only travelling abroad I've done has been bee-related - speaking, judging etc - and I can go almost anywhere in the world and be put up by a beekeeper. It's been the core of our activities for the last almost thirty years and I expect it to be the same when I die.
There's something so mysterious about honey bees that it's impossible to tear yourself away from them, permanently. And when you understand how much Man depends on bees, especially for pollination, they can't be ignored. The relationship, through millenia, between honeybees and Man is very deep.
Not a satisfactory answer I'm afraid, some things can't adequately be expressed in words.
Yes, nowadays people use (against all instructions from nanny) cotton buds to clean out the ear wax. Early man probably used twigs. The Romans refined that practise and used bronze or bone scoops, then a multi-purpose tool was invented (Innovations was around even then) which brought together the ear scoops and tweezers in one tool.
I've been following this thread with some attention, and have learned many new things about the way of bees for which I thank you!
I've been involved with the web since it crept out of CERN - initially as an information resource and laterly as a marketing and transaction medium. I had great hopes of it in the early years but have now come to view it with a deal of scepticism, although still deriving my main income from it!
On the whole I agree with Mary Fisher - she has identified precisely the What and Why and When And How and Where and Who of her site and its audience - things that many Information Architects, Web "designers" and Knowledge Managers signally fail to do. I would counsel leaving that part of the site well alone.
It is obvious that there is much to be learned about these artifacts and their uses and history. I wonder if a set of illustrated pages, not necessarily aimed at selling your wares, would be a useful addition to the web - there's so much dross and inaccurate cut'n'pasted repetition that truly original material is a welcome discovery. And if you do ... please include the bees!
That's very kind. I don't like many of the sites I see, too much colour, movement, noise, pictures ... it seems that if it *can* be done designers
*will* do it. I worked on the KISS system - partly through ignorance
-) -when I 'designed' my site. I still haven't mastered Dreamweaver but I enjoy learning new skills more than anything else so am prepared to be guided. At the moment a grandson (of course!) answers any questions I ask.
I had wondered about that but don't know how to go about it. At the moment all the pictures are stored in My Pictures folder, carefully classified for easy retrieval. Not that I need to retrieve them often. It's mostly so that Spouse can be reminded of previous work and specifications.
- there's so much dross and inaccurate
I know ... to say that I distrust all websites is not true, there are some excellent ones. But you have to sift them from the rest. I don't think that's peculiar to websites though, I have a lot to do with bee book publishing and know that plagiarism is the rule rather than the exception there as it probably is in much hobby literature. My publisher always says that there are only two good books on beekeeping, they're both out of print. And he makes his living from publishing bee books! Being on the inside, like you in your discipline, he knows ...
LOL! I don't have the facility for close up photography and there are some excellent professional shots of them anyway. As for hives and beekeepers, well one set of hives looks much like another set, beekeepers mostly look the same too when they're dressed in their 'My God They've Landed' suits ...
I do have one or two pictures of me with honey and candles but I think they're uninspiring. They were taken by my photographer boss when I did have the idea that p.r.o. pictures might be useful. They weren't. The only ones publicity people do want, to put in event leaflets and the like, are those of us in period clothing. And no bees.
That's not the whole story, they can't see several colours at the red end of the spectrum, which we can. Sorry if you were misled.
I was at Harewood House on Saturday and the scent of the intensely blue hyacinths in the parterre was blowing my head off too but there wasn't a bee in sight in that area ...
There's so much we don't know - although I'm sure someone somewhere has made proper stuies of what bees smell. They certainly have on what a bee can see.
I'm so sorry to hear about the arthritis - suffer a bit myself but not seriously. Really damning when it destroys your interests. Just about to get new neighbours ourselves - hope they aren't going to be the difficult type. I've kept bees here for 30 years and it would be just my luck if some poser with a 4x4 gets stroppy about them.
I started with bees in my early twenties - a friend's father had moved his bees to a derelict house near Fort William that we used as a climbing base. I still have a vision of one of the kids we were looking after retreating very rapidly one day with some bees in pursuit. But it was enough to kindle an interest and the father later became allergic and had to abandon the hives, so I got all the equipment (full of wax moth and muck !! :>( ) and then a couple of nuclei from somewhere. Curiously another previous beekeeper came into give me a hand and discovered he had become allergic in the intervening years as well.
Going to get a dose of rape this year as the nearest field is just coming into flower. Will build the hives up quickly but it's no real use otherwise and will have to be extracted very quickly.
It hasn't destroyed any of my interest, there are always other aspects to one's intereests. It's not as though I played the double bass ... :-)
Don't pre-judge what they'll be like. You know the ways to avoid conflict but if you have to move them that's no great problem.
I was amazed, driving up the A1 last week, to see that OSR was in full flower in some fields.
?
It does but I believe that it's been the saviour of British beekeepers. It makes excellent soft set honey and mixes with other honeys very well. I won't have anything said against OSR honey, it's only problem is one of management and that's up to us. If we can manage to eat on time daily we can manage to take off the frames on time - especially if they're in your garden.
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