Book III of Geoffrey Chaucer's epic Medieval poem, Troilus and Crisedye, contains the line: And after winter folweth grene May Even with only a cursory understanding of Middle English, it's pretty obvious that Chaucer is commenting on May being the first month of the year when everything is verdant. Winter is over, the trees are in full leaf. However, despite my colour blindness, the colour I mostly associate with May is yellow ... the flowering gorse, the broom and - of course - the oil seed rape (OSR). Oil seed rape flowers Troilus and Crisedye was written in the mid-1380's, a couple of cen ..read more

The qualities of the queen - her fecundity, longevity, genetics etc. - are the most important influence on colony 'success'. You could measure that success in terms of reproduction (if free-living, does the colony swarm successfully?) or - of more relevance to a beekeeper - by the weight of the honey supers. But bees do other things as well, so success could be quantified by spring expansion (for financially-rewarding almond pollination contracts at ~$200/hive), Royal jelly or propolis production, or preferential pollination of specific crops. Beekeeping ... so much more than honey! But, what ..read more

All around the country, new beekeepers - fresh from attending a How to start beekeeping winter course - will be buying their first nuc, eagerly watching a bait hive for scout bees, or precariously teetering up a stepladder trying to entice a lost swarm (someone else's) into a skep. Your first bees ... a notable event. Congratulations. At about the same time, second year beekeepers will be checking their hive (or perhaps hives by now?) for evidence of swarm preparations. If they started with a nuc last year, they might have got through the season - not least because the weather was often poor ..read more

One of the attractions of beekeeping is the seasonal variation, both within a single season and between one year and the next. Early colony expansion enables the spring nectar flow to be exploited, and leads simultaneously - almost inevitably and so reasonably predictably - to swarming. Colonies are re-queened (or re-queen themselves) and settle down for the summer, nucs are prepared, queens are reared - though it makes sense to do those two in the reverse order ? - and the summer honey is harvested. Things start to slow down, colonies contract, you finally feel in control of things, miticide ..read more

I think I'm more excited by the potential created by the identification of the maternal effect in honey bees than anything beekeeping-related in the last decade. Perhaps I need to get out more? I first mentioned the maternal effect in a post titled 'Bigger queens, better queens - part 1'. I'm not going to rehash the science here. You should go back and read that post for the gory details scientific evidence. And - while you're at it - don't forget the prequel, which explains why bigger queens are better queens. More research is needed, but the key observation is that queens lay bigger eggs in ..read more

... does not exist. There are some good poly nucs, a few that are reasonable and a couple of shockers. I own or have used about five or six different designs. I now almost exclusively use just two - sold by Maisemore's or Thorne's - both of which are good, but neither of which are close to 'perfect'. ? Maisemore's sell two different - though at least partially compatible - National poly nucs. I've got both, and the one I show in the images below (painted green) is the better model. In the vague hope that someone who designs and manufacturers poly nucs reads this (unlikely I know, but "if yo ..read more

This is the prequel to Bigger queens, better queens - part 1 which was all about the maternal effect in honey bees. The maternal effect, although well-known in other species, has only recently been demonstrated in honey bees. Essentially, it involves the queen preferentially laying larger eggs in queen cells than she lays in worker cells. These larger eggs develop into larger and heavier queens. Perhaps unsurprisingly - though also reassuringly - these larger queens have more ovarioles and lay more eggs than smaller queens. Finally, these larger queens appear to pass on desirable traits to th ..read more

If you're reading this in an email newsletter on Friday evening then something went right. However, if you received no email, it's Monday afternoon, and you had to search for the site on Google to find this post, then I've clearly still got some work to do. Moving The Apiarist from Wordpress to a new publishing platform (Ghost) has been a bit of a headache, but I'm hoping that the worst is over and things will now run smoothly. If I'm right then I can start focusing on beekeeping rather than subscriber lists, broken hyperlinks or related geekery. But, I'm rarely (ever completely?) right, so ..read more

Is there a statute of limitations on beekeeping topics for the internet? How frequently should a blogger write about swarm control or thelytokous parthenogenesis or the provenance of honey? The answer of course is as often as they want to. It's a free world. But that doesn't mean that the posts will be read ? If I wrote about swarm control every week, I'd quickly run out of new things to write, but - even more quickly - I'd run out of readers. It's an interesting topic, there are lots of ways it can be achieved (and several by which it cannot) and, at times during the beekeeping season, it's ..read more

Synopsis: How can something so simple cost so much? Dummy boards and fat dummies. Some you can buy, but shouldn’t. Some you can’t buy at all. Both can be built very inexpensively. Introduction Is there a statute of limitations on beekeeping topics for the internet? How frequently should a blogger write about swarm control or […] The post Dummies, fat dummies and followers appeared first on The Apiarist ..read more