Here Comes Spring 2023!

I’m not admitting to being slow on the uptake, but most things in my life tend to be one step ahead of me these days; it must be the recent high temperatures (any excuse…). That fact is definitely true of the bees, but they are several strides in front when it comes to planning.  Forget about already having the Christmas shopping done, they are thinking about next Spring and how the colony is going to build up. As beekeepers we can help them with these preparations, and Autumn is an important time for assessing the health of the queen bee, the size of the colony and the amount of stores they have gathered. 

Bees and Brambell's

We’ve recently been in conversation with a UK-based beekeeper who is studying for exams in Bee Health, studies that appear to involve for the most part killing bees so they can be dissected and examined. Not very healthy for the poor bees involved, but you can’t make an omelette without breaking  a few eggs, as they say…

Of course, we want the best for our bees and it has been interesting to hear about the new research centred on pest control, and the recent ideas around how to identify and treat for certain diseases. As in France, the same in England, with last year seeing an increase in the number of outbreaks of European Foul Brood, a disease that can lead to colony loss. The effect of varroa mite infestation also appears to be more insidious than first thought, with the mites being vectors for several different diseases that can deplete a colony of bees over time.

Helianthus By Any Other Name

Sunflowers are everywhere in this part of France, a wonderful show of bright yellow that heralds the long summer days and has beekeepers rubbing their hands in anticipation of a bumper harvest of the well-known granular honey. Without wishing to dampen the mood too much, sunflowers are also a vivid reminder of the current situation in Ukraine as they are the country’s national flower. The sunflower, soniashnyk in Ukrainian, is also the symbol of the resistance movement against the invasion by Russia.

Dear Diary

“Keeping a diary” seems to be something that most people have done, in one way or another, at some point in their lives. It’s usually as angst-ridden teenagers that we scribbled down incredible insights (hands up those who admit to identifying ever-so-slightly with Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole, aged 13 and three quarters).  Those diaries were always supposed to be secret, but as we got older we didn’t have the time or inclination to retain the habit. Perhaps social media, with its instant access and global reach, has replaced the traditional form of diary-keeping, but there is definitely still a place for old-fashioned observation in the world of beekeeping. Fictional diaries such as ‘The Diary of a Provincial Lady’ (E M Delafield) and ‘Diary of a Nobody’ (G&W Grossmith) are amusing and tell a good story, dealing as they do with the comings and goings of ‘ordinary people’, whereas Samuel Pepys’s Diary and Daniel Defoe’s ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’ are informative and useful in helping us understand life in a definite place and time. The ‘diaries’ or records kept by scientists are even more so, and this is where the link with beekeeping comes in.

When you start your beekeeping life, you may only have one or two colonies and so it will be fairly
easy to remember what’s going on, when and where. Having said that, we have been known to mis-remember things e.g. which queen bee is in which hive, even when there are only two of them! As time goes on, and as the number of colonies rises, remembering becomes more difficult, and so we urge people to get into the habit of record-keeping right from the start. Records are not just for checking what you did last time you did a hive inspection, but they are essential when you want to look at performance – colony build-up, productivity (bees and honey), resistance to disease etc.

The power of imagination

Warning:  this post contains a little ask 😉

When did our addiction to digital gossip, reality TV and the 24/7 need to be connected start?  Was it sudden or, like us, does anyone else think that it's been a bit like the boiling frog urban myth?

 

Here at 13 Bees we think it wouldn't hurt to slow down a little and to help others do the same.  To this end, the ever-creative Amanda brought together her love of honeybees and telling stories to publish her first children's book on Kindle. If you know any 7-11 year-olds who might just appreciate something that isn't Fortnite, Tiktok or a PS5, this might be just up their street..... 

 

It tells the story of an intrepid (but not always smart) honeybee named Thistle as she faces all the joys and challenges that our bees face in real life.  It reminds me of the stories my grandparents used to tell that fired our imaginations when we were kids 😁  At 99p, why wouldn't you give it a try?  You might even help to inspire the next generation of beekeepers and imagineers (that's a real word, we checked).

Follow the link to read a preview over at Amazon:

https://amzn.to/3sWCrgK

Sweetness and Light

 We could all do with some of the above in our lives, as another difficult year comes to an end, and whether you’re a honey-lover or not, it’s sometimes surprising to realise how intertwined human society is with bees and honey. The Egyptians in 3000BC adopted the bee as a sign of mankind’s ingenuity, a symbol of power, industry and production, and Cleopatra is said to have used honey as part of her beauty routine. Bees are reputed to have settled on the lips of Plato, indicating his future brilliance with words, and similarly, a swarm of bees is said to have gathered on baby Ambrose’s face, leaving behind a drop of honey. Ambrose became a bishop in fourth-century Milan who encouraged monks to use the bees’ chaste hard-working life as a model for their own.

Bees and honey have been part of music, poetry (many of us can recite the first verse of ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ by Edward Lear!), architecture, art, philosophy, politics and religion for thousands of years, so it’s no wonder these days we have such an affinity with them. We used honey long before sugar, in ceremonies and celebrations, for healing and for mead. The idea of honey now has the sweetest of associations, its flavours evoking thoughts of summer days and the sound of bees buzzing between flowers in the sunshine.  AA Milne was on to something when he created the best known honey-lover in fiction, Winnie-the-Pooh. Thankfully, nowadays, we have safer, more efficient ways of harvesting honey; I don’t fancy just sticking my paw into a hive and scooping out what I can!

PUBLIC ENEMY NO.1

If you keep bees, sooner rather than later you will become aware of a particularly nasty character known as Varroa destructor. This parasitic mite is aptly named, and varroa is the bane of many a beekeeper’s life, as well as being a real problem for honey bee colonies. It is one of THE drivers of global honey bee health decline, and so cannot be ignored. Alongside being vigilant for various diseases, beekeepers need to monitor mite levels within their hives at regular intervals in order to manage and control mite infestation.

The varroa is a crab-like mite that pierces the skin of adult and pupating bees. It was thought to feed on the haemolymph (roughly the equivalent of blood in an insect), but recent research, led by Samuel Ramsey, PhD, is now leading scientists to believe it is the fatty body of a bee, similar to the liver in mammals, that the mites are seeking. This breakthrough in understanding more about the mites is key to working out ways to combat them and much research is underway around the globe to perhaps find something that makes that fatty tissue taste terrible and help the bees!