dansar

Thanks. Haven’t NZ Beeswax always sent out an extra document advising to do a longer treatment period? interesting the extra bit about not reallocation of brood frames in to use for honey. Residue in wax would be the issue.

How and where were the Bayvarol strips located?

Use some that awesome currency conversion and make a donation so you can message them 👍😉

My oldest (15 yrs old) is starting to get some recognition around the Waikato. She has been doing commissioned work of pets and wildlife. This one is getting picked up today. Colour pencil and acrylic.

I keep tripping over it so I am letting it dry out and take it home for firewood😂

Quite pleased with all the nucleus hives today. Finally some of the syrup is being stored and even capped rather than being consumed. The cooler weather will be having an effect. I went to this site expecting to be taking a lot of the colonies to another site to have Bees and brood donated from stronger hives, I only needed to do that with three of them. It has really highlighted to me how difficult this season has been when even nucs made in December are still small colonies. I just kept hoping for the magical flow; it never happened😩🐝. In past seasons I never had an issue with building up nucs in to 10+ frame colonies. Last season was difficult to get queens mated but not too bad for natural forage. This was average for queens and really poor on forage. Time for the bees to rest and here’s hoping for an easier season coming.

How does it go harvesting during a really bad robbing time? Probably more of a problem working by my self, but I find after clearing the supers and carrying to the ute, bees are flying back in the box and in to the stack when lifting off a inner cover that sits on top. I stop down the farm track or road to take the covers off and let some of the bees fly out, but it is probably just timing issues of when to take honey off .

you need to use a taller rim any way (room for the bees to escape too rather than clogging up the escape unit) so in my mind it is easier to have dedicated escape boards rather than having escapes on a standard hive mat and adding an extra rim. Personally I have only used fume boards but have all the gear to make up escape boards for next season.

Catlins Honey down South Island

More beekeepers coming back to their “grass roots” pollination work in spring to guarantee a pay cheque. Then too many beekeepers to service too few crops so the price for pollination drops......

It’s a problem that here to stay whether it is governed or not. We all have heard or know of unmarked hives and beekeepers who are not registered. These hive owner tend to be less inclined to educate themselves in hive health management (fact). Another issue I have personally encountered is language barriers. Immigrants who do not speak or understand English well are adding to the complexity of this issue. (Thinking out loud right now, “wouldn’t it help to have a multi language document/website available to get this info out there?”). And there are also some people whose ability is not matched to the skill required to keep bees. @Mark Goodwin has some good info about the incidence of AFB from when beekeepers governed themselves and who, since the agency was instituted beekeepers have possibly tended to sit back and say “great, someone else to go and do the hard work for me”. The management of hives changed, there finally was someone to pass the buck to, when in actual fact nothing should have changed albeit a fee was now paid to employ an industry body to oversee that the standard was being maintained by beekeepers. The privilege of keeping bees has seen a multitude of people taking up beekeeping predominantly as a hobby and even on to a commercial scale. This in turn has created the “perfect storm” to enable AFB to be spread far and wide. The ability to keep bees without the need to have any training in the recognition and control of AFB and other hive health issues is probably the single biggest reason to see that AFB will never be eradicated in NZ. If the organisation overseeing eradication of AFB in NZ is to have success then there needs to be more Information, Education/training, Auditing , correcting and then penalties if noncompliant after steps of correction have not been made. As a small country is is difficult to fund an industry overseer and even harder to justify the cost when very little visible action is shown by the agency. Until this is obvious then I believe that the beekeeping industry will continue on this never ending cycle of finger pointing and having no personal accountability.

My observation is that bees will work it with their own digestive juices. I havent seen anything stored so can only assume it is digested and shared around the colony.

I did

Haha, the women I my family have child bearing hips, that makes the front bench seat pretty cosy.

@Dave Black has posted an article in the past regarding research about sugar vs honey for feed. Surprisingly sugar is good.