dansar

No. I worked at Kiwi Lumber across the road. Unfortunately for Pacific Pine they needed to make milling and marketing changes 4 years ago. In NZ there is huge reduction in Pruned log supply due to a change in forest management (less pruning). They needed to develop a structural timber market which would have needed a huge financial investment (Kiwi Lumber did this). A change like this would have been very difficult being a single sawmill such as Pacific Pine.

South Waikato is getting very dry. Checked an apiary today. No honey surplus collected in 3 weeks. In fact we took a honey super off Some hives as they won’t be filling it any time before winter. 🙁

Some pretty simple energy storage in this unit. Recharging isn’t too costly. The waste from making the stored energy can safely be recycled. Only needs a + and a - to make a new one and if you’re really lucky you get 2 new units. And there are not too many issues with end of life disposal.

I agree with your comment re the FGMO/Oxalic fogging method. The fog it not located specifically to the hive it travels outside of the apiary area as well. I would not like to expose neighbors and animals to a toxic cloud drifting to them. Aside from that the level of PPE that is required to administer treatment with this method will make it cost prohibitive from the start.

Analytica offer pollen count testing, although they don’t identify every pollen that is in a sample. High percentage of unidentified pollens in our samples last season. I think that comes down to the lab technician building up a library of samples to recognise.

Unfortunately as the worlds social (and NZ’s) problems hit closer to home every day many people become apathetic to it as nothing they can do will ever have an effect on fixing the situation. So many people become insular.

Good idea. I’ve done something similar using it as a pheromone board when rearing queens before. Some of the sites fill up a complete FD box with Broome pollen, drives me absolutely nuts. It’s good if you’re splitting all the hives but a nightmare trying to keep the brood nest open.

Yeah I have always wintered as singles. There’s been a change in my work load through late winter when I would normally be doing checks for feed stores. That caught me unprepared last season and a number of hives starved. That won’t happen next season. I’ll just be trying to control swarming instead!🤣

Just print your own copy/ies and laminate the pages. Bind it or hole punch the corner and spin on a key ring loop. Simple..

The frustration I have with most of my sites in spring and early summer is that if I run single broods the bees fill 1/4 - 1/2 of the honey super above the excluder with Broome and blackberry pollen. It’s hard to get that 1st honey super clean with only honey and then that becomes my wax moth box....😬

For the first time in 10 years of beekeeping I am running hives as double FD brood. I’ve got another 24 supers to go on hives next week, after that it will be a couple of weeks before I see the girls again. Youre right though it is drying out pretty quickly even for the green Waikato.

In the South Waikato and up at Tokoroa (which is at the same elevation as Taupo) the only way hives would be in 4 boxes now would be from either having a full box of honey on from over wintering and/or 50kg of sugar being fed to them. White Clover has only just started to pop up, it won’t flow until end of December at the earliest I reckon. certainly amazing how hives build up throughout the country.

You could under super and then at honey extraction time take all the new fresh honey supers off and drop the old honey top box back down for winter feed.

Just needs to get his Shiitake together😉🤣