"Mary Fisher" wrote in message . net...
"T i m" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 11 Apr 2004 17:15:39 +0100, "Mary Fisher"
wrote:

snip

If you mean the social wasps - the yellow and black striped ones - they are
wonderful creatures, more intelligent and evolutionary advanced than any
kind of bee. They also have a fascinating natural history, do a huge amount
of good (in human terms) than many other insects and there's no reason for
them to be persecuted.

Incidentally, the 'brother' wasps can't sting they don't have the equipment,
I think you're worried about the females. The workers :-)

It's a delight to have a wasp nest at eye level where I can watch it and
show it to the children. On the rare occasion I've not been able to persuade
someone to keep a wasps' nest I've brought it home, put it in the deep
freeze to kill the inhabitants humanely and later carefully cut it apart to
show the wonderful structure to people.

Mary

Another beekeeeper joining on this one. Can't fault anything you have
said, Mary. My only quibble is your enthusiasm for wasps which, while
I am told do a lot of good, I've never actually seen it, but what I
have seen is the damage that wasps can do to a hive in the autumn.
They are stronger than bees and can sting continuously whereas the bee
can only sting the once leaving part of its abdomen with the sting to
carry on pumping the venom into you - hence bees are somewhat less
enthusiastic to sting you than wasps are. But wasps will rob out a
weaker hive very quickly in the autumn if steps aren't taken to
protect it.

Where abouts are you - I'm just west of Edinburgh. As you talk of an
apiary, I take it that you have a significant number of hives; I think
in my enthusiastic youth I got up to 8 at one stage but 3 or 4 is
quite enough now.

Out of interest just how did you get bees out of a chimney - I faced
this once and ended up using greenhouse smoke bombs to drive them out
as I couldn't safely get to the chimney itself.

The only disaster I've had with swarms was having re-hived one, it
then decided to flit again but did so as another hive swarmed so the 2
combined and went across the road into the neighbour's house -
unfortunately they had just moved in and the bees had found a cavity
high in the stone wall. The local authority had to called in to
exterminate them - I wasn't there at that time but would have been
interested to see how the guy did it as the access was very difficult.
Relations with those neighbours never really took off !!.

Rob