Hi, my name is Neil, I'm a product design student in Brighton. I'
looking into possibly doing a home beehive design, and yourselves a gardeners have probably encountered the odd bee or two. I have a quic question for you then, are you;
a/ completely unafraid of bees. b/ very frightened of them - you may even be a confirmed apiphobi (fear of bees) or cnidophobic (fear of stings). c/ somewhere in between: c1/ you are able to keep calm and ignore them, but wont go to close c2/ you'll move away / go indoors until they're gone c3/ you'll try to get rid of them using bug spray etc.
Any replies will be of great value to me, thankyou for taking the tim to read and respond.
Question is how much do you know about bee keeping to fathom the idea of making a "home beehive" design. It's not like keeping bees is anywhere near the same as putting up a bird house. You'd have more chance of being hit in the head with a bird than a swarm moving into an empty box on its own.
You need to buy a queen and a starter colony, then acclimate them to the hive. Not exactly a hands off process by any means.
Most home owners will cringe at the idea of having to handle bees to get the setup done and then for gathering the honey.
Tie that in with the fact that so many people who get started in this have a tendency of over collecting of the honey and not leaving enough for the bees to survive the winter, killing off the whole colony.
Ann, did you hear this new theory that bees are somehow effected by some chemical which is giving them a form of Alzheimers and they are literally forgetting where their hive is, and also forgetting how to alert one another with their dance which points them back in the direction of this hive? I don't recall where I heard this, but have you heard it in any of your bee keeping journals?
I try to avoid disturbing their nests. That can be painful. Other than that I ignore them. I do spray in-ground nests of yellow jackets in our lawn or flower beds since it is impossible to not disturb those nests. I also spray nests of paper wasps in shrubs that I have to prune.
We have some yellow jackets that come into our house. They are totally nonaggressive. They are attracted to light. When they bask in the sun by sitting on a window pane, I crush them so I won't risk stepping on them in my bare feet at night and get a foot pain.
A 2000 Cornell University study concluded that the direct value of honey bee pollination to U.S. agriculture is more than $14.6 billion. Beekeeping is very commercial here. It is about fruit and vegetable productions, not honey production. Migratory commercial beekeepers raise humungous numbers of bees and move them to the crops.
For example the blueberries in Maine are pollinated by hives trucked in from over a 1,000 miles away in South Carolina.
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migratory commercial beekeeper in Washington State with over 13,000 hives transports his hives to California to pollinate almond fields.
There is a list of migratory commercial beekeepers at:
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is one way for farmers to stay in business in areas with colony collapse disorder. These commercial beekeepers protect their hives from chemicals that cause CCD. No one is saying the bees are dying, the bees just aren't finding their way back to their hive. No dead bees are found.
Think about that statement for a minute.. If bees are not making it back to the hive, do you really think they're surviving somewhere without a food source?
Furthermore, the cause of CCD has not been pinpointed yet. It could be any number of things. Sure, it could be chemicals but it could also be viral, bacterial, or maybe even those odd suggestions such as cell phone towers messing with their navigation.
Now, having a traveling hive for hire to pollinate is swell, but those bees that they are pollinating in place of aren't just wondering around asking for directions.. I'd say they're toast.
Imidacloprid. Google Gaucho and France. The French banned the stuff. There has been an exponential increase in the use of it in this country over the past two or three years. It's in the grub control we put on our lawns (Merit), and they spray it all over ornamentals like those huge sunflowers sold in so many markets, for blemish-free blossoms. It's been shown to make bees 'forget' how to get back to their hives. I think the link is strong, but it's the 800 pound gorilla sitting in the middle of the room due to the chemical industry in this country and how it's so imbedded into our agriculture and economy. But that's just me.....
The CCD problem seems to have many sources, but the smoking gun seems to point to too many chemicals in the environment. Remember, honeycomb is like a sponge, it soaks up all of these toxins, which include the stuff we're using for agricultural use and the stuff we're (I'm speaking in the inclusive we here, not all beeks are using these bad chemicals) using to combat the varroa mites. If you watched the special PBS did on CCD you'd see the scientists astounded to see how high the virus level is in our poor bees.
There is a movement to get beekeeping back to a more natural state, but it's hard. A commercial beekeeper can't afford to let his stock die off and let natural selection take place (selection for bees that withstand varroa without treatment). The life of a commercial beek is very difficult, there are fewer and fewer out there making a living at it. The salvation may come from the hobbyists like us who keep bees because we love them and love their byproduct, honey. We'll see how it all goes. All I know is I'm trying really hard to get our six hives through the winter. We treated with formic acid pads (formic acid is naturally present in honey, it's non-toxic, and seems to have been effective, there were dead mites all over the bottom board when we removed the pads). I'll let you know in the spring if they make it (fingers crossed).
Think about this a minute. They are out gathering food. Why should they come back to a man made hive?
They have identified chemicals that make the bees loose their sense of direction and they have found these chemicals in the areas of the CCD.
Bees existed wild for many millenia before man made his first hive. Keeping bees in hives is relatively new in their history. They will do just as well as Canada Geese do when they don't fly south.
c/ somewhere in between. I got stung by a honeybee this summer by my pile of apples which attracts them, and it hurt like crazy for a long time, like hours and into the next day, even after I put baking soda paste on it. That was a first in 30 years. I didn't see that one, but if I do, I just freeze until they fly off. My grandmother and now my grandson have developed a very bad allergic reaction to them; luckily so far I'm ok about that. A bee sting can be deadly for some people.
Other than that, I love them, and never kill any if I don't have to, inside or out, even the ground wasps. Both honeybees and bumblebees have found their way into my house, 5 or 7 a day for awhile a couple years ago, until I guess we got a broken window in the attic fixed, still a few every summer, and I devised a method to trap them with a yogurt cup and a knife with a very wide blade (have accidentally killed a couple that way), and release them outside. I really felt bad when a bumblebee got trapped between my screen and storm, I cracked the storm and screen open at the bottom, it was pitiful watching it try to find its way out, would not come down to the open air, so I was raising and lowering the screen and storm and accidentally squashed it.
This is how goofy I can get. One summer they were tearing shingles off the roof, and completely covered the opening for some little ground wasps that never bothered me, and I was mowing then. They were upset. I dug until I found some clothing I thought would be protective, looked mighty weird, and took a rake and pulled the shingles away so they could get back in their nest.
If one gets in my car when I'm driving, I do feel a little panicky, but they usually fly right out an open window.
The only things I will kill, don't know about a dangerous dog, are cockroaches, flies and mosquitoes. The cat has caught a couple mice and chipmunks. I saved two chipmunks and one mouse, made her drop them. Of course, I can't save them all. She came to me where I have my computer holding the the body of a chipmunk in her mouth meowing funny, another she got by the tail. I made her let them go, they hid in the closet like I had hoped, I put her out, and shut the door. Then I cracked open the window and set some peanuts on the windowsill. They both found their way out. One morning I got up to peanut shells all over my keyboard lol. By now, I have a Havaheart trap, think I've got it set right, didn't seem to go near it.
Oops. A couple years ago I got stung with my yogurt cup method. It didn't hurt too bad at all. Maybe it depends on where you get stung, hand vs. inside of my thigh.
Because it's their home. And it's where the queen is. They don't have minds of their own, they return to their hive (if they can).
That isn't the bottom line on the CCD issue. It's a suspect, but it hasn't been definitively stated.
Stephen, that just isn't true. If they can't find their hive, they die. They don't all go out enmass to the same place, together, stay to together, and return together. Nevermind the fact that the queen never leaves the hive - except when she's a virgin, on her mating flight.
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