"Rob Graham" wrote in message



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,

I've seen them take huge numbers of what Man calls 'pests'.

but what I
have seen is the damage that wasps can do to a hive in the autumn.

So have I. To my own hives.

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.

- er - that assumes that bees know that they're going to lose their sting
mechanism and therefore die when they sting. I don't subscribe to that
theory.

But wasps will rob out a
weaker hive very quickly in the autumn if steps aren't taken to
protect it.

Yes - but a weak tree will fall to a strong wind. It could be called
Nature's culling ... will the weak colony survive without help through the
winter?

Last week I dismantled equipment which was occupied by a swarm last July.
the colony had died, I found a small cluster which obviously couldn't travel
across the comb to access the large quantities of honey. It was, I'm sorry
to say, convenient for me that the bees died but it could be said that if
they were strong enough to survive they would have done. There was one wasp
in the pile, dead. That's meaningless!

Where abouts are you -

Inner city Leeds. 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.

No, I don't think we ever had more than fifteen but more than two would have
been too many to keep in our garden with unsympathetic neighbours. A friend
who has an organic goat farm wanted bees on her land and invited us to put
them there. It was idyllic. But I've developed arthritis and because
sometimes my fingers are too weak to turn the page of a magazine I know that
it would be dangerous for me to handle frames. I sold or gave away almost
all my equipment and some of my books, the bees themselves went to an
enthusiastic and intelligent man I met on a newsgroup.

I've seen too many old beekeepers neglect their bees through infirmity, it
does no-one any good (including the bees) and I was determined that it
wouldn't happen to me.

The above mentioned swarm went into a pile of boxes left for cleaning while
we were away. They'd been taped but the bees were determined. You can
imagine the potential mess inside. As it happened there was some fabulous
comb honey and I have some dripped honey too which is delicious. But it will
definitely be the last, the frames will be used as kindling for my bread
oven and the boxes used to grow potatoes.

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.

Story elsewhere.

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 !!.

I'm always sorry about killing bees. It might have been possible to get them
out with a one-way escape and a small nucleus with queen and brood next to
the wall. It does take a lot of time though, we've done it once.

There are some difficult places and we have some great stories - but all
beekeepers do!

Mary

Rob