Thursday was a clean-up day. A couple of dozen brood frames passed through the wax steamer, yielding a couple of kilos of good if dark propolis tinted wax. Unlike the honey/pollen stained yellow variety that most people are familiar with, brood wax is much darker and less sought after – except by carpenters who have […]

Because bees use chemical scents (called pheromones) to communicate information, including threat and alarm, a few cool wafts from a Beekeeper’s smoker confuses this mechanism and keeps the colony more compliant. This smoking action doesn’t stress the bees, who quickly return to normal once the Beekeeper has moved on.–––––––#localbusiness#welshbusiness#beefacts#bees#beeswax#beekeeping#beekeeper#localhoney#honeyfacts#rawhoney#rawhoneybenefits#honeybees#nature#farmlife#carmarthenshire#Wales#welshhoney#beehealth#climatecrisis#pollinator#savethebees#sustainable#natural

Hint, it may not be where you’d think. The question of the origin of the honeybee wasn’t really clear until the arrival of modern science. We knew that bees as a group arrived on the scene (in what is now Africa) during the Cretacious, some 140 million years ago, the product of a pro-veggie schism

According to the Independent Newspaper (22/11/22), research in Canada has shown that taking two spoons of unprocessed raw honey daily can reduce levels of dangerous LDL cholesterol. The study found that honey promoted the development of sought after high-density lipoproteins and improved inflammation. These finding are good news for people with a potential for type

If you’re read a couple of these recent blog posts, you may have seen that honeybees often communicate essential information to each other using chemical signals called pheromones. Here’s a case in point. Yesterday I used a little smoke to calm a grumpy hive (while I gave them back an extracted honey super to clean)

100m years old. If you have ever seen any of the Jurassic Park franchise, you’ll be familiar with the concept of an insects preserved in amber. Although this is indeed a thing, most of the fossil record for pollinators actually spans only the last 65 million years (and thus very few fossil bees actually co-existed

Long before we grew grapes for wine, or even pinched a few bread grains to make simple beers for that matter, people were still getting tipsy. Mead, the delicious alcoholic drink fermented from the sugars in honey, may have been our first tipple and was certainly held in high regard by our earliest civilisations. There

If you’ve ever been told that bees make hexagonal shapes for reasons of either tensile strength or instinctive maths, well sorry, best think again. In reality all of the holes in a honeycomb were originally made smooth and very round. It’s physics, specifically good old surface tension, that pulls the warm wax into the space

Although not everyone in the countryside is that enamoured by the idea of using farm land for large scale solar projects, the evidence suggests such projects are surprisingly good for nature, creating a local oasis of diversity. . Joint research by the Universities of Lancaster and Reading, recently published (in the Journal of Ecological Solutions

This week looks drier, so hopefully a chance to catch-up with overdue bee jobs, but today was a day for helping with the sheep and lambs. Like most farms, lovely Penlan, home to the Quarry Bees, is an absolute mud bath right now. The last period has seen two and a half times the normal

Unlike an aeroplane wing which uses a convex shape and powered motion to create a pressure imbalance that creates the upward push that we call lift, a honeybee’s methods of levitation are more complex and adaptive. First the bee locks their wings together (2 on each side) and drives them forward, creating a vortex and

Have you ever wondered how bees stick to a flower while sipping nectar? You might think that the answer would be down to the bees, but for once it isn’t them. In reality, it’s the flowers that have evolved adhesive coatings that stick mechanically to the texture of a bee’s feet providing a solid connection.