Sailabee

Maybe "Evergreen' rides again? Court case over and fined, but no embargo on them keeping on keeping on!

That map is rubbish - the Auck Council are already warning of the need to conserve water as the city supply dams are well down, it is regularly being advertised in the media.

Please bear in mind that Britain has had varroa much longer than we have in NZ, so has had many more generations to evolve VSH characteristics. Our bees will get there, just not anytime soon, without a lot of human intervention, which, if not properly managed will narrow the range of the gene pool, which right now we have a huge advantage over most countries.

Randy Oliver spoke about treatment free beekeeping while out here in 2011 for the NBA Conference, we realised that at that time, Randy was in the business of producing nucs for which he was able to charge a premium, so was able to cost in brood breaks, so this would not really translate to viable beekeeping for those who are reliant on pollination and a honey crop.

They tried the 'no treatment' approach in Russia when varroa first appeared, and when over 95% of the total number of colonies were dead, and the whole food chain was collapsing, the illustrious rulers decided that maybe that wasn't the way to go.

Revolutionary have what I have been told a really tight patent which they guard very carefully, so would need a real point of difference to negate the need to spend time and money arguing.

Originally for the first year, you could buy the revolutionary unit, but then you could only lease, and a condition was that the owners extraction plant had to be used for the further processing, so that meant that most were faced with a considerable distance to cart the pails anyway, and I heard a take it or leave it price paid for the honey. About then the company seemed to become more difficult to contact as few found that suitable.

There have historically been pockets of AFB in the Waitaks, so I would be thinking more about that risk, rather than the mythical colony which is totally varroa resistant. To me, not worth the risk or time.

I know an excellent long-term beekeeper who was an early adopter, and bought one of the revolutionary gizmos, and loves it, but this only removes the comb and wax off the frames into bucket which then need to go to an extraction plant to process. as I see it, one of the main advantages of the system is that of disease control - the beekeepers boxes and frames stay on the correct hive, and as there is going to be an increasing risk in bigger plants with different beekeepers supers sitting in hot rooms, and post extraction in storage until picked up, and possibly exchanging all sorts of greebies especially in the changed estate of the industry. The downside if one could call it that is that bees have to draw out new foundation every time a frame is extracted, so not same economy of energy. Right now when wax is fetching a high price there must be added value in the increased wax produced - perhaps balancing out the lower honey production.

The development of queens producing stock with higher VSH characteristics is still a work in progress, mainly based Otago University, but will only improve with time as the longer it is since varroa arrived, the further the VSH characterisics have developed. The trick is to not narrow the gene pool too much in the process. In Europe, some are mating a queen artificially with one drone only to get a 90%+ VSH rating, which I think is plain stupidity because only breeding for one thing means a whole lot of other positive things are lost, and very quickly.

I don't know the details of the RMP setups, but I think an NP1 would be hard to formulate without the use of some final hot water washdown. The stationary ones I have seen have used gas to reduce the electrical draw down, and there are vagaries in moving gas around the country in large cylinders.

If wekas dump on carpet while on a diet of ripe puriri berries there is no getting the stain out - cheaper to cut out and repair the section of carpet.

Would also need a massive mobile generator as most of the machinery in a commercial size plant is 3 phase, and really sucks the juice through, even using gas to heat the wash down water.

So, thinking this is your kitchen, you are on ' short rations'?

Much of the cost of new housing is the change in expectations in size, and facilities - imagine a new house with only one bathroom? We are demanding huge homes with all the best of bells and whistles when most families have never spent so little time as a family as they do now.