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Woohoo, excellent news.

I would do the happy dance but nobody wants to see that /truffle-shuffle

 

Thanks guys - I'm hopeful that's the end of that fun little chapter and I can get back to doing ****!

 

^ Awesome news is awesome

 

Getting lustful thoughts for cheese sandwiches yet? or does that come later?

 

Listening to the crickets and the rain on the balcony in the apartment we're staying in, in Italy on lake Como.

This is the life

 

I've wanted a MAME cabinet for a long time now but I just don't have the room. This box is big enough to mount a Raspberry Pi and a 2.5" HDD as well as the interface board, so that'll do....for now . Using a "proper" arcade stick is soooooo much better than using a joypad.

I will freely admit that I cheated however: I didn't cut the MDF panels myself, I bought a pre-cut kit. I did price up all the tools I'd need to build it myself, but the kit was far cheaper.

Excellent news, good sir.

 

This year's crop:



Twenty jars of the finest Birmingham (predominantly) Lime tree honey.

Despite the worst summer in three years (only 2012 was worse), which has given beekeepers all over the country plenty of headaches, we managed to extract some honey from one of our two hives.

As it happens, in Victorian times Birmingham was known for its Lime tree honey, because so many were planted in and around the city. These trees are not related to the Lime tree (Citrus genus) of the small green lemon-type fruit, but belong to the Tilia genus, also known as Basswood or Linden tree. Where our hives reside now is a high density of these trees. Moreover, in rainy and wet weather they are favoured by the bees for foraging as its flowers hang downwards, thus sheltering its nectar and the bees from the rain as they go about their business. So in rainy summers honey is likely to have a higher proportion of Lime nectar and pollen in it.

During an exceptionally warm summer with a high aphid count, bees can harvest the sweet sugary water droplets excreted by aphids as they gorge themselves on the sap of the Lime leaves. This results in a particularly dark, sweet Lime honey which is highly praised. It is also rare --you can expect such a crop only once every five years-- and very expensive.

 

I don't know if those jars are a good harvest or a bad harvest (I know nothing about bee keeping) but it sure looks sweet, no pun

 

Mead or gtfo

 

It is a poor harvest, quantity-wise. In a good summer I can get 60 jars (500gr each) from a single hive. But the weather has been very changeable, quite wet and cold and its worst spell was right over July, which is a hive's peak productive period. Then August was dismally wet so the bees struggled to dry out the nectar sufficiently to cap the honey. In the end I had to extract it and finish the process in a fan oven at 45C, before it ended up fermenting in the frames.

It's not been a good year for bees... Some hives are starving and several beekeepers did not get much honey at all. I've already started feeding one hive --it has already taken down 12 Kg of sugar syrup.

Still, foraging is good. We just took 1.2Kg of blackberries from the local park, and that is just the beginning as more is still ripening. We'll probably get about 5Kg in total. Elderberries are ripening too. Our local park is really good for this stuff but everybody ignores it. People just don't forage in our neck of the woods --which leaves more for us.

 

Nexxo, there's been a spate of bee thefts from hives where I am (North Wales/Anglesey). I don't know whether it's just a local problem or nation-wide but I've never heard of it happening before, have you?

 

It has happened over here, but in rural locations --entire hives are just swiped. It pisses beekeepers off because it is obviously done by people who know how to handle a hive --which suggests other beekeepers.

Most of us keep hives in gardens, fenced allotments or apiaries where there is a modicum of security. Certainly I keep quiet about where my hives are, but they are behind lock and key for sure, sheltered from view in an allotment which is visited daily and keenly guarded by the local residents whose homes overlook the site as they have plots of their own there.

However if a hive is found just empty --frames still in place but the bees all gone-- they have just swarmed. They can do that suddenly if they decide that the site is unfavourable, or if they are at risk of starvation. Of course neonicotinoids can contribute to that so it is more a rural phenomenon.

 

Yes, that makes sense.

I heard one of the affected beekeepers being interviewed on the radio and she explained that they raided her "public" hives (or words to that affect). She used them to demonstrate beekeeping to visiting parties, so presumably they would have been quite easy to access.

Here's a link to the story (I just read that "bait hives" have also been found, used to lure bees away from their established hive. Madness!).

http://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/bee-thieves-north-wales-strike-9905367

 

There's a couple of things that don't make sense in that story. The only way you can take bees from a hive is to take the frames --the easiest way of doing it-- or to shake the frames over a container to dislodge the bees. Of course the worker bees are of not much value without their queen so you have to make sure you get her too.

The thefts are supposed to have occurred at night, which is a good time for stealing or shaking the frames as bees don't like to fly at night; they'll stay put on the frames or just drop in whatever container you shake them. However spotting the queen is difficult enough in broad daylight, let alone at night. You'd have to peer at the frames with a flashlight for some time, or else shake the frames out over a queen excluder (a mesh large enough for worker bees, but too small for a queen to get through) to make sure you got her --or just hope you did. Either way a flashlight is required and it is messy, which is counterproductive to a quick, stealthy grab. So if I wanted to do a quick theft I'd just take all the frames out and dump them in an empty hive box of my own and be away in minutes --or just take the whole hive. Shaking the frames delays things, and just stealing the queen is way too difficult.

Bait hives will attract swarms but there is no way that an established hive will abandon its home full of brood and honey and pollen stores to set up in another hive --unless you've been grossly mistreating them, perhaps. They simply won't do it. So bait hives won't lure anything that wasn't going to swarm anyway. And attracting a swarm isn't theft --by law a swarm is finder's keepers as soon as it hits the sky... but I agree it is bad form to set them up near another beekeeper's apiary.

Sometimes colonies will swarm without a successor queen in place. I've had it happen to me twice and it's a pain. What happens is that despite your best efforts the hive manages to sneak a queen cell past you (a big cell on the frame in which a queen is reared; you try to prevent that from happening so the hive won't swarm) and the old queen takes half of all the workers with her and leaves for pastures new. The young successor queen goes out on several mating flights and then sets up as the new queen of the hive. Unfortunately sometimes the new queen doesn't make it back --some passing bird eats her or she gets caught in the rain or something. The workers then have 2 weeks to turn whatever eggs that are left behind in the frames by the old queen into another queen and try again. This is a nervous time for the beekeeper; if the second new queen fails the hive is fated for extinction unless the beekeeper introduces a queen.

So it is not unusual to open a hive to find half your workers (typically about 15000) and your queen gone. They weren't nicked; they just swarmed. It happens.

 

Looks somewhat good then apart from this years harvest right? Lets hope for better weather next season and that you and other beekeepers get to have your bees to yourselves.

Edit.
Need to remind myself to refresh the page before I post.

 

Interesting stuff. With regards to how they were taken, although no mention is made of it in the article I linked, I'm pretty sure the thieves didn't just remove the bees. Other reports I've read have mentioned "loss of equipment" too (presumably frames):

'The equipment itself doesn't have much of a value. Lots of it will have been used for many years, so I don't think it would just be for that.'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...aught-CCTV-faces-hidden-beekeepers-hoods.html

 

Yeah, I think they'd have lifted the frames. Perhaps quickly locate the one with the queen on, then four more and you have a nucleus.

Like I said: I keep mine hidden behind a high metal fence...

 

Sure its worth a few quid. But at the same time it doesn't seem particularly lucrative unless you were dealing with very large scales at which point stealing bees is probably not on the agenda. So its confusing me as to why they would be stolen.

Also how often do you get stung?

 

Yes, it looks like rural beekeepers now have to take similar precautions too.