BEEKEEPING NEWS Back to top
Obituary. John Atkinson
I was very sad to hear of the death of John H Atkinson who died on
28th March of this year. I knew John from my research days in the
Cardiff University Bee Research Unit when I had to decide upon a
topic for my thesis. I’d got some fanciful idea about queen bees
which I thought I could research but then I met John at the 1992
Honey Show in London and in discussion he suggested the much under
researched topic of Drone Congregation Areas as a better
alternative. With his initial guidance, and using Karl Showler’s
knowledge and hospitality in Hay-on-Wye, I spent many days with my
balloons, fishing rod and reel and my artificial queen, testing the
various parameters of a DCA every 15 minutes. It got me a
Distinction from the university and launched me into the world of
beekeeping science and for that alone I will always be grateful for
his guidance.
His work on explaining the very difficult subject (to me at any
rate) of honey bee genetics and queen improvement was important for
not only did he work out new procedures and methods but he had the
ability to explain this complex knowledge to people like myself who
had previously put it all in the ‘too difficult’ basket. Reading his
work and taking to him, I actually began to understand it – and that
was quite something! His book, ‘Background to Bee Breeding explains
it all.
John kept going right until the end, working diligently with and
writing about his McBean hive barrow and his Jordan Pollard
insemination kit (I have one) and producing articles of huge
interest to beekeepers around the world. He was even producing copy
for the Beekeepers Quarterly until very recently and I guess that if
you are going to take the journey we all must take then that’s the
way to do it. He won’t be forgotten in a hurry and I was glad to
have known him.
Australian Honey Industry Threatened
THE Australian honey industry says it is under threat from
contaminated Chinese imports which contain a potentially deadly
carcinogenic and are being sold overseas as Australian-made.
The Australian Honey Bee Industry Council says the contaminated
honey is being relabelled as made in Australia then exported to
Europe. The council says the scam is putting the industry’s
international reputation at risk and it wants the Federal Government
to take action to stop it. The council’s executive director, Stephen
Ware, said chloramphenicol had recently been detected overseas in
royal jelly labelled Australian-made. Chloramphenicol is used to
control disease in prawns and bees and is an antibiotic used to
treat serious diseases in humans, including typhoid fever. It has
rare but potentially life-threatening side effects. Mr Ware said it
was not practical to expect quarantine officers to check every batch
of Chinese honey.
Some Australian health food distributors were importing contaminated
royal jelly and propolis (a resin that bees collect from trees) from
China and re-labelling the products as made in Australia or product
of Australia, then exporting them. Mr Ware said apiarists had
repeatedly warned importers about the contaminated royal jelly.
“It’s not good for Australia’s image. We’re copping the blame when
it’s not actually us,” he said.
Mr Ware said importers were getting around labelling laws by
blending a filler in Australia, mainly wheat gluten, with the
contaminated royal jelly. Melbourne beekeeper Graham Grigson said
Australia’s testing facilities for contaminated food were
inadequate. “Any honey that is diseased has to go straight back
where it came from,” he said.
In a submission to a federal parliamentary inquiry into the future
of Australia’s $80 million honey bee industry, the industry council
urged the Government “to better enforce the regulations associated
with product labelling of honey bee products”.
US HONEY FIGURES 2007. National Agricultural Statistics
Service
USDA Washington, D.C.
These figures were released February 29, 2008, by the National
Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), Agricultural Statistics
Board, U.S. Department of Agriculture.
United States Honey Production was Down 4 Percent over the year.
Honey production in 2007 from producers with five or more colonies
totaled 148 million pounds, down 4 percent from 2006. There were
2.44 million colonies producing honey in 2007, up 2 percent from
2006. Yield per colony averaged 60.8 pounds, down 6 percent from the
64.7 pounds in 2006. Colonies which produced honey in more than one
State were counted in each State where the honey was produced.
Therefore, yields per colony may be understated, but
total production would not be impacted. Colonies were not included
if honey was not harvested. Producer honey stocks were 52.5 million
pounds on December 15, 2007, down 13 percent from a year earlier.
Stocks held by producers exclude stocks held under the commodity
loan program.
Honey Price Down Slightly
The 2007 all honey price was 103.2 cents, down slightly from 103.6
cents in 2006. U.S. and State level prices reflect the portions of
honey sold through retail, cooperatives, and private channels.
Prices for each color class are derived by weighting the quantities
sold for each marketing channel.
Prices for the 2006 crop reflect honey sold in 2006 and 2007.
POISON HONEY IN THE COROMANDEL
Holidaymakers stricken by toxic honey in New Zealand,
A 70-year-old Hamilton woman has become the fourth person to become
ill after eating honeycomb purchased while holidaying in the North
Island near Whangamata. Health authorities have issued a warning
about comb honey sold in the Coromandel (a peninsula in the North
Island) in recent days after two holidaymakers became violently ill
and a child nearly died.
The toxic honey was sold at a roadside stall and it is understood it
was made by a Whangamata hobbyist. Now authorities are arranging
drop-off points for people with honey they fear may be contaminated
so it can be collected and disposed of. Bees would otherwise find it
and return the toxins to their hives.
Wellington mother Jo Whittle, her three-year-old son Daniel and
eight-month-old baby were holidaying in Onemana with her parents,
her sister and her sister’s partner, Joseph Reynolds, when they
bought the honey on Thursday, the last day of their four-day break.
It was in a plastic box with a transparent lid. Reynolds, who is
visiting from London with Whittle’s sister, ate a honey sandwich
that night. He said it had no odour and tasted fine. Hours later he
felt nauseous and disorientated. He made himself throw up and went
to bed.
While asleep he had a seizure and his family called the emergency
services number. Reynolds says the next thing he knew he woke up in
an ambulance. “At that point I couldn’t even remember what country I
was in.” Thames Hospital doctors initially thought Reynolds had
suffered a diabetic attack but when Whittle and her son also became
ill they suspected food poisoning.
At 4am Daniel started throwing up and two hours later he had a
seizure. By that stage Whittle was also vomiting and weak, so her
mother was looking after the boy.
Whittle said she heard her mother cry out and when she raced to the
lounge she found her son had turned blue and had stopped breathing.
“I was extremely frightened and thought my son was going to die...
He was on the couch and his back was arched, he was shaking up and
down.” She laid him on the floor and he started breathing. The
family called the emergency services again. Ten minutes later
Onemana volunteer firefighters arrived and gave Daniel oxygen until
ambulance staff arrived to take over.
The poison honey is produced by bees feeding on a native bush known
as tutu. When they gather honeydew produced by the sap-sucking vine
hopper insect feeding on the plants, they can introduce the poison
tutin into honey. The New Zealand National Beekeepers Association
CEO Jim Edwards said suspect honey should not be thrown out, as that
would return the poison to the food chain. “Bees will actively seek
out honey, they’ll find it anywhere,” he said. “If they access it,
they’ll just quietly take it back to their hives.” A Health Board
spokeswoman Mary Ann Gill said the honey producer had voluntarily
withdrawn it from sale when told about the incident and has given
the honey to the health board for analysis. Food Safety Authority
spokeswoman Trish Pearce said the producer would face charges under
the Food Act if it was found they had sold unsafe honey. Whittle
said it was “incredible” how little honey they had eaten Daniel had
a scraping on a bun and Reynolds had about two teaspoons’ worth.
Whittle had even less, which was possibly why she was less sick.
 |
| Tutu |
The small tree tutu (Coriaria arborea) is found throughout the
country, especially on bush margins and alongside streams. Except
for its swollen petals, all parts of the plant are poisonous.
Coriaria Arborea
Around 1900, New Zealand chemists identified tutin as the poison in
this plant. This acts on the central nervous system, causing
convulsions and breathing problems that may lead to death.
Previously There have been few cases of human poisoning by tutu
since 1900, although one man died in 1989.
Could it be an answer to CCD?
 |
 |
| 5lb Bag |
40lb bag |
Agricultural Research Service (ARS) entomologist Gloria DeGrandi-Hoffman
created the research and development agreement that led to this new,
convenient source of proteins, vitamins and minerals that bees need
for good health. Bees can eat MegaBee as a meal or snack when forage
is unavailable either due to time of year or bad weather.
Better nutrition might be a key to reversing the decline of honey
bees, Apis mellifera, in the United States. Colony Collapse Disorder
is blamed for losses of once-thriving colonies, as are problems
caused by mites, beetles, Africanized honey bees, diseases and
pesticides. DeGrandi-Hoffman, at the ARS Carl Hayden Bee Research
Center in Tucson, Ariz., sought the expertise of Gordon I. Wardell,
entomologist and owner of S.A.F.E. R & D, LLC, in Tucson, to develop
a new, nutritious food for bees. The resulting MegaBee has now been
on the market for about six months. It’s manufactured by Castle Dome
Solutions, LLC, in Yuma, Ariz., and sold by Dadant & Sons. Tests
conducted in California by Wardell and ARS scientists in the winter
of 2007 showed that bees ate MegaBee at about the same rate as
natural pollen. But MegaBee-fed bees helped produce more brood, or
young, than did their pollen-fed hive mates.
Ongoing research, in orchards and in laboratories at the Carl Hayden
centre, should reveal even more about bees’ year-round nutrition
needs. Nutrition investigations, a special emphasis at the Carl
Hayden laboratory, are part of a new, nationwide program of ARS-led
scientific research on honey bee health.
Adapted from materials provided by US Department of Agriculture.
RESEARCH NEWS Back to top
Honey Bee Invaders.
In some interesting new research, scientists have found the first
evidence that honey bees, (Apis mellifera) invade new territories in
repeated assaults. A new study demonstrates that when these honey
bees arrive in a place that has already been invaded, the newcomers
benefit from the genetic endowment of their predecessors by
exploiting the genetic resources of their predecessors
The researchers from the University of Illinois in the USA, analyzed
specific markers of change in the genes of honey bees in Africa,
Europe, Asia, and the Americas. They also focused on geographic
regions—such as Brazil in South America—where multiple honey bee
invasions had occurred. They were looking for tiny variations in the
sequences of nucleotides that make up all genes. Certain versions of
these single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs, or “snips”) are more
common to African honey bees, while others occur more frequently in
honey bees in western Europe, eastern Europe, or Asia.
By comparing these SNPs in bees from different geographic
territories, and by looking at the frequency at which particular
alleles, or variants, occur in functional and nonfunctional parts of
the honey bee genome, the researchers were able to determine that
the invading bees were not just randomly acquiring genetic material
from their predecessors by interbreeding with them, but that certain
genes from the previously introduced bees were giving the newcomers
an advantage.
(An earlier study led by the same researchers and published in
Science in 2006 showed that A. mellifera originated in Africa and
not Asia, as some had previously hypothesized).
That study revealed that the honey bee had expanded its territory
into Eurasia at least twice, resulting in populations in Eastern and
Western Europe that were quite different from one another.
The earlier analysis also confirmed and extended results of previous
studies showing that African honey bees had mixed with but largely
displaced their predecessors in the New World, which were primarily
of western European stock. When the European old-timers mixed with
the African newcomers, their offspring looked, and in most respects
behaved, like the African honey bees. These more aggressive,
“Africanized” bees (so-called “killer bees”) received a lot of media
attention in the U.S. as they moved north from South America.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the first
Africanized honey bees appeared in Texas in 1990. In less than a
decade they had also spread to southern California, Arizona, Nevada
and New Mexico. The researchers wanted to understand the
evolutionary mechanism that allowed the African honey bees to move
into these new territories and dominate the bees that had arrived in
the New World centuries earlier from eastern and western Europe.
Their analysis of about 440 SNPs selected randomly from throughout
the Africanized honey bee genome showed that most of the alleles
were common to African honey bees. But of the alleles common to
European bees, those found in functional parts of the genome (in
genes) were showing up more frequently than those in nonfunctional
regions (between genes).
They asked the question: Is hybridization an essentially random
process? When the African honey bees mated with the western European
honey bees that had been in South America for centuries, one might
expect that the hybrid offspring would randomly pick up both the
functional and nonfunctional parts of the genome, but what they
found was there was a preference for picking up functional parts of
the western European genome over the nonfunctional parts. It
appeared that the Africanized bees that kept some of the functional
western European genes were gaining an advantage, Whitfield said.
Those African bees are doing better because there were western
European honey bees there for them to mix with. Now they have a
signature for evolution in the genome.”
While the researchers do not yet know how these European honey bee
genes are enhancing the survival and fitness of the Africanized bees
in the Americas, it may be that specific traits from Western Europe
are beneficial, or it may be that being a hybrid is, in and of
itself, a good thing for these bees.
 |
| Invading bees. Are they
being helped by their predecessors? |
|
In a separate finding, the researchers also discovered a genome-wide
signature of evolution associated with the ancient expansion of
honey bees from Africa into temperate regions of western and
northern Europe. In this expansion, functional parts of the genome
have changed more than nonfunctional parts. They think that these
changes may involve social adaptations to survive the hard winters.
It appears that the way the honey bees survive in temperate regions
is similar to the way humans do. They have a shelter and they store
resources. Not needing to survive in such cold weather, African bees
store less food and reproduce more.
So how does an animal that’s basically tropical make it? How does it
expand its territory and thrive in very harsh winter conditions in
this temperate region? Asked the scientists. Humans did it, and Apis
mellifera did it in some interestingly parallel ways.”
The findings appear online the week of Feb. 25 in Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences. The researchers were University of
Illinois entomology professor Charles Whitfield and postdoctoral
researcher Amro Zayed. Whitfield is also an affiliate of the
Institute for Genomic Biology.
Adapted from materials provided by University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, USA.
Can wasps tell us the answer?
Sociality and dominance are subjects that have long been researched
by scientists and beekeepers have been interested in this aspect of
insect science because they deal with one of natures most social
insects. So what do you need to be socially dominant? There’s new
evidence supporting the idea that bigger brains are better. A study
of a tropical wasp suggests that the brainpower required to be
dominant drives brain capacity.
University of Washington researchers have found that key processing
regions in the brains of both males and females of one wasp species
not only increased in size with age but were also associated with
being dominant. The study also showed different patterns of brain
development in males and females. Certain sub-regions were larger in
males and others were larger in females. This matched expectations
based on males’ greater use of vision and females’ greater reliance
on their antennae.
UW researchers Sean O’Donnell and Yamile Molina found increased
brain growth in areas of the insects’ brains called the mushroom
bodies, which vaguely resemble the cerebrum in humans and other
vertebrates. A mushroom body sits atop each hemisphere of the wasp
brain. The mushroom bodies process input from the eyes and antennae,
and are involved in learning and memory. The social paper wasp that
was studied, Mischocyttarus mastigorphorus, is unusual because males
are dominant over females, a rarity among social insects, said
O’Donnell, a UW associate professor of psychology. Most social
insect societies—bees, ants and wasps—are predominantly female, with
males short-lived and subordinate.
 |
| Paper wasp |
O’Donnell and Molina, a UW doctoral student, focused on a part of
the insects’ mushroom body, called the calyx, where neural
connections are made. While the overall size of the calyces did not
differ between the males and females, specific sub-regions were
larger in each sex. Males rely on vision when they leave the nest
for mating opportunities, and the part of the calyx that receives
visual input was larger. In contrast, most female interaction takes
place on the nest, where tactile and odour senses are important and
the part of the calyx that received input from the antennae was
bigger among the females. “When you are dominant among insects you
get more food,” O’Donnell said, “and in this case it gives males
more energy to leave the nest and mate. The fact that the males are
dominant and long-lived makes this species interesting from a
neurobiological standpoint. We think they have pretty sophisticated
cognition compared to males of other wasp species.”
The researchers studied five wasp colonies in a tropical cloud
forest near Monteverde, Costa Rica. They first marked all resident
adult wasps on the nests and these individuals were excluded from
further analyses. Newly emerged wasps then were captured and marked
over the next several days and returned to their nest. Each colony
then was observed in the morning and afternoon every three days over
the course of more than a month. Behavioural data such as giving and
receiving aggression were collected, as well as time spent on and
off the nest. After this observation period, sections of the wasps’
brains were examined under a microscope.
Among the unanswered questions stemming from this study include how
long these wasps live and how long these patterns of brain growth
continued. The scientists only followed them for 42 days, so they
don’t know how long they live or if their brain development is
similar to humans in terms of if and when they start to decline
cognitively. They say that an exciting new idea—the social challenge
hypothesis—suggests that large human brains evolved in response to
the demands of complex social interactions. The wasp work extends
this idea to individual brain variation. The question is, Do you get
to be dominant because of a big brain or does being dominant drive
brain size? That’s still an open question and the researchers admit
that they don’t know which comes first, This study suggests the high
cognitive demands of being dominant drive brain capacity and
supports the social brain hypothesis. The next step is to broaden
the scope of the research by looking at more species of paper wasps.
They are interested in how brains evolve in concert with social
evolution. There is the intriguing possibility that there are
similar patterns across wide spans of evolutionary time. The goal is
to get a bigger sample of social wasp species and examine this.
The researchers say that we are looking at super-distant animals
when you compare wasps and people. Yet there may be an interesting
commonality between them. Increased brainpower may be part of being
social, no matter who you are. What makes this exciting is we see
some common patterns in how brains change as societies evolve. As we
see changes in social complexity, there are changes in brain
structure. If it is good for people it should be good for wolves,
dolphins and paper wasps.
This research, funded by the National Science Foundation, has been
published in the online edition of the journal Developmental
Neurobiology. This article was adapted from materials provided by
University of Washington.
What can Honey Bees, Hummingbirds and Bats do that Bumble
bees can’t?
Honey bees and hummingbirds can hover like helicopters for minutes
at a time, sucking the juice from their favourite blossoms while
staying aloft in a swirl of vortices. But the unsteady air flows
they create for mid-air suspension – which hold the secrets to tiny
robotic flying machines—have also been observed for the first time
in the flight of larger and heavier animals, according to scientists
from the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the
University of Southern California and his colleagues at Lund
University, Sweden. In a follow-up study of bat aerodynamics,
appearing in the February 29, 2008 issue of Science researchers were
able to measure the velocity field immediately above the flapping
wings of a small, nectar-eating bat as it fed freely from a feeder
in a low-turbulence wind tunnel. They used a wind tunnel at Lund
University specially crafted for research on bird flight on bats.
Birds fly “at the spot” against a headwind, allowing detailed
investigation of wing movements using high speed video cameras. It’s
also possible to visualize the vortices around the wings and in the
wake using fog as tracer particles.
Thanks to a very reliable behaviour pattern where bats learned to
feed at a thin, sugar-filled tube in the wind tunnel, using the same
flight path to get there every time, and the construction of side
flaps on the feeder tube, scientists could make observations with
bright laser flashes right at mid-wing without harming the bats.
Before this, they had no direct evidence of how the air moved over
the wing itself in these small vertebrates.
The researchers’ findings challenge quasi-steady state aerodynamic
theory, which suggests that slow-flying vertebrates should not be
able to generate enough lift to stay above ground, said Spedding, a
professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering in the USC Viterbi
School of Engineering. Using digital particle image velocimetry, the
researchers discovered that Pallas’ long-tongued bat, Glossophaga
soricina, increased its lift by as much as 40 percent using a giant
and apparently stable, re-circulating zone, known as a leading-edge
vortex (LEV), which completely changed the effective airfoil shape.
 |
How can the bats generate such high lift? One of the team members
and lead author of the new study, Florian Muijres, explains: “The
high lift arises because the bats can actively change the shape
(curvature) by their elongated fingers and by muscle fibres in their
membranous wing. A bumblebee cannot do this; its wings are stiff.
This is compensated for by the wing-beat frequency. Bats beat their
wings up to 17 times per second while the bumblebee can approach 200
wing-beats per second.”
“The air flow passing over the LEV of a flapping wing left an
amazingly smooth and ordered laminar disturbance at the trailing
edge of the wing, and the LEV itself accounted for at least a 40
percent increment in lift,” Spedding noted in his commentary,
“Leading Edge Vortex Improves Lift in Slow-Flying Bats.” The LEV
makes a strong lift force, but it may be equally important that the
smooth flow behind it may be associated with low, or at least not
increased, drag. “The sharp leading edge of the bat wing generates
the LEV,” Spedding said, “while the bat’s ability to actively change
its wing shape and wing curvatures may contribute to control and
stability in the leading-edge vortex.” Spedding and his colleagues
believe observations of LEVs in active, unrestricted bat flight have
important implications for overall aerodynamic theory and for the
design of miniature robotic flight vehicles, which have been
undergoing dramatic modifications in recent years.
“There’s much to be learned from bat flight about unsteady flows and
forces on small bodies,” Spedding said. “We have suspected for a
while that insects weren’t the only creatures affected by highly
unsteady viscous air flows, but now we know that larger animals
adapted for slow and hovering flight, such as these nectar-feeding
bats, can – and perhaps must – use LEVs to enhance flight
performance. So, if we wish to build a highly manoeuvrable,
slow-flying surveillance plane, maybe it should flap its wings like
a bat?”
The paper in Science is: Leading-Edge Vortex Improves Lift in
Slow-Flying Bats, authors are F T Muijres, L C Johansson, R
Barfield, M Wolf, G R Spedding and A Hedenström.
Adapted from materials provided by University of Southern
California.
HOW QUEEN BEES ARE MADE. DO ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS COUNT?
Most beekeepers realise that diet is the key to causing fertilised
larvae to develop into queens or worker bees but New research by
scientists at the Australian National University may explain why
eating royal jelly causes honeybee larvae to become queens instead
of workers – and in the process adds new weight to the role of
environmental factors in the nature/nurture divide.
 |
| The queen
bee. Does nurture have an effect on their formation? |
|
Scientists from the Research School of Biological Sciences at the
university have discovered that a copious diet of royal jelly flicks
a genetic switch in young bees that determines whether they’ll
become a queen, or live a life of drudgery. Their findings are
published in the latest edition of the journal Science. “Royal jelly
seems to chemically modify the bee’s genome by a process called DNA
methylation and disrupts the expression of genes that turn young
bees into workers,” explain the researchers.
When they ‘silenced’ a gene controlling DNA methylation without
recourse to royal jelly, they discovered that the larvae began to
develop as queens with the associated fertility, rather than as
infertile workers. They believe this is the first time that DNA
methylation has been functionally implicated in insects. The
molecular process is common in vertebrates – including humans.
Dr Richard Maleszka, of the university explains that if you have
identical human twins, and one develops schizophrenia, then you need
another mechanism to explain how this can occur when they have the
same genetic blueprint.
He goes on to say that DNA methylation links genomes to
environmental factors like nutrition and modifies how genes express
themselves. Discovering this in bees, which are a much simpler
biological model than humans, means we have a better opportunity of
understanding more about how this process occurs. The researchers
will continue to study how DNA methylation affects bees, as they
suspect that the process could also be responsible for how the
insects’ brains develop, and may thus be connected to bee behaviour
and even social organisation. The research suggests that
environmental factors, such as how organisms are nurtured, can have
a major influence on how they develop.
The current work grew out of the honeybee genome project, which
mapped the entire genetic blueprint of bees.
This item was adapted from materials provided by The Australian
National University
The Hive
I have included this article by Oliver Field with the permission of
Hives Save Lives, a British beekeeping Charity the details of which
can be found on www.hivessavelives.com The charity is taking
Oliver’s advice and producing a modern hive for use in Africa, but a
hive with a difference. See what you think.
The hive which is being manufactured by Hives Save Lives in Uganda
was designed by Oliver Field, author of 'Honey by the Ton'.
Buy Honey By The Ton from the Amazon website and earn money for
Hives Save Lives - Africa.
 |
| Hives on stands |
About Oliver Field
Mr Field has over twenty years of experience as a consultant on
development projects in Africa and Asia involving apiculture and the
honey industry, including beekeeping and queen rearing, honey
production, preparation and running of training courses both in the
UK and overseas, beeswax production and producing cosmetics from
beeswax. He has also been a successful commercial beekeeper in the
south of England for over 30 years.
 |
| Mercy and the hives stacked up |
The case for a modern hive in Africa
The need for a different approach to hive design in some parts of
Africa is best summed up by Oliver himself:
The honey produced by the African bee is just as good as honey from
any other part of the world. The only difference is how it is
produced and the quality of that honey. The reason for some of the
poor quality is that almost all the honey is taken in a wild comb
form and pressed from the combs. The resulting product is often full
of impurities, such as excess pollen, dead bees and old comb.
To take a huge step forward, we have to use a modern hive for the
production of honey. We have to leave behind the smoking out and
hand pressing of the honey and change to a movable type of frame
which will allow for the centrifugal extraction of the honey. This
honey will now be marketable in any part of the world.
This will be done by the use of what I would like to call the 'long
Langstroth' Hive. This hive will have sixteen Langstroth frames in a
horizontal plane, and will have no supers in the vertical plane (as
in a European hive). The excluder needed to keep the Queen away from
the honey combs will be introduced vertically and not horizontally.
The point here is that the African bee needs to keep cool so the
Queen will expand her brood nest outwards, whereas the European bee
needs to keep warm and these bees will build a brood nest in a
vertical direction.
For many years this fundamental truth was poorly understood, and a
great deal of African Aid Funding was put into European hives, which
did not serve the purpose of the African Bee. If we can harness the
African Bee properly, its production of honey will be greatly
increased and the quality of that honey, once it has been
centrifugally extracted, will be much greater and so the earning
power of each hive unit will be increased. Not only this, but the
hives will become far more manageable. Increase will cease to be by
unmanageable swarming when too often that swarm is lost, but by
manageable increase. This will mean increasing the number of hives
by splitting colonies and not losing the stock by unexpected
swarming.
So we will achieve a greater control of the bees and the honey. We
will also be able to see which hives will need food to take them
through long dry spells and losses through starvation or absonding
will be limited to a minimum.
The African bee is a truly wild creature and does not have the
disease problems of the interbred European strains used throughout
most of the world. For this reason, the use of antibiotics will not
be necessary and the honey will be far more acceptable when it is
produced in a cleaner and more manageable fashion. In fact, I think
that African honey could become a leading organic brand once the
production problems are put right.
Oliver Field
ARTICLES Back to top
In this short article from Chad he brings a new perspective
to using bees – this time as artists. This time they are outlining
Chad’s local beekeeping magazine BeeLines. It seems easy enough so
why not give it a go and as Chad suggests try Mick Jagger.
PAINTING BEES
By Chad
It is very important to maintain good relations with your local
scrap yard. They will, on occasion, come by something they think you
might like and call you. This is how I came by my three Portakabins
from which Chad s Honey business is run. One is fitted-out for
bottling; another for extraction and the third is for storage. The
good thing about scrap yard Portakabins is that they are cheap. They
cost just a little over the cost of delivery. The bad thing is they
might be a little leaky. On Thursday I got up at 7.30am but my bees
must have been up at 5am.When I got to my extraction Portakabin at
8am most of the flying bees from the thirty hives I have on the farm
were in it waiting to greet me. The sound was tremendous, thirty
swarms in a confined space, wow. You should have seen them explode
out like pressurised steam when I opened the door! I spent an hour
trying to remove all the bees from the room and found that as they
like to fly towards the strongest source of light, using a
combination of turning on the strip lights with the windows darkened
and opening the main door I could channel them out. I then spent
another hour fitting sponge to the ill-fitting door frame. Having
done this I found that the bees were still getting in somehow. Then
I found them pouring in through the keyhole. I had been extracting
honey in the Portakabin the day before and the smell of fresh honey
must have been irresistible.
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Whilst extracting honey I had made rather a mess andwent to bed
wondering how I was going to clean the floor where some large pools
of honey had developed, however I noticed the following morning that
in under three hours the bees had stripped the whole floor of honey;
all the drips, dribbles, smears and stains were gone. Using my new
Apimelter toy I had prepared a large block of wax; this had a sticky
layer of debris still attached to it. I decided to place this
outside for the bees to clean up.
 |
Seeing all of the bees clustering over the block of wax gave me an
idea. John Chamberlain called around on Thursday afternoon to find
me and Ceri experimenting with honey pictures. I told him it was
Ephemeral Art , and that I was a pioneer in this field. He told me
that I had too much time on my hands. I told him he didn’t seem too
rushed off his feet himself and we went in for tea totalk about my
art work. Honey art is great, you draw in honey on a light
background and the bees feeding on the honey behave like pixels. For
a canvas I prefer to use old toilet-cubicle doors, their off-white
colour shows off the bees nicely. Those of you worrying about me
wasting my good honey will be relieved to hear that I used a jar of
John Whitford s honey, I won it in a raffle, it s fairly ropey stuff
but the bees didn t seem to mind. I had planned to take a series of
time-lapse shots to show how the bees growing number and enhance the
image but after 6 shots my camera batteries died and I ran out of
John s honey. Being an artist is a struggle. Hopefully, in the next
edition of Beelines, I will have more examples of my art work which
is being prepared for an exhibition touring most of the top London
galleries in late November.
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| |
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Ceri the artist.
Within a short time the painters assembled. Unfortunately the camera
battery ran flat after this picture was taken so we are unable to
see the canvas when the maximum number of bees was present.
All photos by Chad and Ceri Cryer. How about a picture of Mick
Jagger for a future project?
RECIPE OF THE MONTH Back to top
Prawns and shrimps are one of my favourite foods which is the
reason I have included another prawn recipe this month. I like them
particularly with an ice cold manzanilla from San Lucar de Barrameda
in Spain. (The dry sherry, not the herbal tea bag of the same name).
These are particularly delicious.
Honey-Tea Grilled Shrimp
1 1/2 lb medium shrimps peeled, de-veined
Salt to taste
2 x green onions thinly sliced
1 cup brewed double-strength orange spice tea cooled
1/4 cup honey
1/4 cup rice vinegar
1/4 cup soy sauce
1 tbl finely-chopped peeled fresh ginger
1/2 tsp freshly-ground black pepper
Combine the tea, honey, vinegar, soy sauce, ginger and pepper, to
make marinade. Remove 1/2 cup marinade; set aside for dipping sauce.
Add the shrimps to marinade and stir them well into the mixture.
Marinate in the refrigerator for 30 minutes or up to 12 hours. (Best
overnight).
Remove the shrimps from the marinade which can be discarded. Thread
the shrimps onto 8 skewers, dividing evenly. Grill over medium hot
coals 4 to 6 minutes or until the shrimps turn pink and are just
firm to the touch, turning once. Season with salt to taste.
Meanwhile, prepare the dipping sauce by placing reserved 1/2 cup
marinade in small saucepan. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat.
Boil 3 to 5 minutes or until slightly reduced. Stir in green onions.
This recipe is for 4 servings.
HISTORICAL NOTE Back to top
It took until the end of the 19th Century or thereabouts to
convince all beekeepers of the stupidity of killing off all their
bees at the end of the season so as to extract the honey. In this
historical note we see why, when arguments for the practice were
both persuasive and seemingly logical. This argument was put forward
by John Levett in 1634.
‘Hath not God given all creatures unto us for our benefit, and
to be used accordingly as may seem good unto us for our good? We see
that many other creatures of greater account are daily killed in
infinite numbers for our sustenance and often for our pleasure, and
is it not lawful for us, to use these silly creatures in such sort
as they may be most for our benefit, which I take to be the right
use of them and the very end of their creation.’
POEM OF THE MONTH Back to top
PURPLE CLOVER
By Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
There is a flower that bees prefer,
And butterflies desire;
To gain the purple democrat
The humming-birds aspire.
And whatsoever insect pass,
A honey bears away
Proportioned to his several dearth
And her capacity.
Her face is rounder than the moon,
And ruddier than the gown
Of orchis in the pasture,
Or rhododendron worn.
She doth not wait for June;
Before the world is green
Her sturdy little countenance
Against the wind is seen,
Contending with the grass,
Near kinsman to herself,
For privilege of sod and sun,
Sweet litigants for life.
And when the hills are full,
And newer fashions blow,
Doth not retract a single spice
For pang of jealousy.
Her public is the noon,
Her providence the sun,
Her progress by the bee proclaimed
In sovereign, swerveless tune.
The bravest of the host,
Surrendering the last,
Nor even of defeat aware
When cancelled by the frost. |
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LETTERS Back to top
Dear David,
Your editorial in the last Apis-UK is the first time I have
read/heard anyone confirm my thoughts on CCD, or Colony Compromise
Disorder, as I prefer to call it. I may be wrong but I do not think
it is some mysterious new disease as the Americans suggest and there
are certainly plenty of examples of it in this country although CSL
seem to be in denial over this. I have friends who have experienced
it and a recent survey of 100 Scottish beekeepers shows that 48% of
losses over an 18 month period, 2004-06, show "Marie-Celeste"
symptoms, as they call them. One of these beekeepers witnessed the
bees actually leaving the hive, something my former colleague at
Rothamsted, Norman Carreck, also observed.
I think the "mystery" is compounded by the fact that some of the
viruses kill bees in under 5 days and the whole colony, strong or
not, can disappear very quickly.
I think "CCD" could be another "Isle of Wight" disease.
I have viewed several American videos on the subject and one thing
that stood out to me was the terrible state of combs in lost
colonies, from dark brown to jet black, and apparently it has been
common practice to put boxes from colonies that have died onto
surviving ones with the intention of splitting them at a later date.
On top of this there are unreasonable numbers of colonies on any one
site, together with, as you suggest, the stress caused by moving
bees up to EIGHT times a year, has, I believe simply tipped the
balance in favour of the pathogens.
NATURAL SELECTION STRIKES BACK!!
Congratulations on a very interesting issue.
Best wishes,
Peter Tomkins.
QUOTE OF THE MONTH Back to top
Which very well known figure said the following, and what
beekeeping item was he talking about?:
“Exactly ********. Here is the fruit of my leisured ease, the magnum
opus of my latter years!”
*I have starred the name in the quote otherwise you would know it
straightaway. Ed.
Editor: David Cramp
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