Early in July, while attempting to move a small swarm of bees, I committed a basic health and safety fail. Rushing, I hadn’t secured my ladder properly, and, inevitably, it moved. I actually wasn’t very high; but, as it turned out, I was just high enough. When I confidently tried to jump to safety, I […]

As bees mature they take on a range of different jobs within the hive. The final task, reserved for the oldest bees, is foraging. It’s perhaps the most physically intensive of all the roles that they will ever have completed, and a bit like forcing pensioners to repair the roads in human society. Foraging is

The beautiful Mabinogion contains many pieces of Welsh narrative prose. It was originally compiled in the 11th and 12th centuries. One of the stories relates to the mythical giant Bran, who is reportedly buried in Twmbarlwm (near modern Newport) . There, amidst a huge hoard of gold, Bran awaits, Arthur like, a call to return

With an aging film reference, I joke about the Swarm Traps that I put out in early May, “build them and they will come”. And, come they usually do. Unusually though, this one turned up while I was actually watching. One very good reason for buying local honey and directly supporting your friendly neighbourhood Beekeeper,

Maybe it’s Bee AirBnB? (And try saving that when you’ve had a few?) Could be it’s the wet Winter or the undergrowth’s got a bit too lush? Maybe the bees are leasing space to relatives? Thing is, there’s a worrying issue in a number of our beehives this Spring. Away from the action, they’ve been

The conventional wisdom among Beekeepers suggests that a single beehive needs access to, at least, one acre of flowering plants, or trees that flower, to thrive. This sounds about right, if you could break that up into different plants giving nectar and pollen consistently over three seasons in a bell curve. If you, like me,

……to save the bees. The problem with the narrative #savethebees is that it’s long on virtue, short on context and infers that honeybee numbers are declining, which isn’t true. You can not become a ‘bee savior’ by popping a beehive in your backgarden to boost the numbers. You’ll be addressing the wrong problem and just possibly making

HAPPY WORLD BEE Day : 20th May 2022

Did modernity nearly kill UK bees? In the decade before the first World War, UK bees began to die. Something was killing them. The culprit has never been properly fathomed and is still debated. Populations were so depleted, that modern British bees carry the genes of imported strains who replaced the dead. For a time

This Queen Bee, pictured strutting her stuff over newly collected nectar (on the 8th May in Horeb, Carmarthenshire,) is now two years old. Pretty isn’t she? You can tell her age by the tiny remnants of coded yellow paint on her thorax (correct placement) and, oops, abdomen (incorrect placement!). Oh well, doesn’t seem to have

Guess who? One of the most impactful threats to a Beekeeper’s charges, and one that you might not immediately think of, is the woodpecker. There are actually two types at large in Wales, the European green (Picus viridis) and their lesser spotted cousins (Dryobates minor). The green woodpecker is the potential problem for beekeepers, since,

One of the weirdest things about a Queen bee is that she can apparently create four different types of offspring from any egg that she lays. By excluding stored sperm she creates Drones, the male bee with only 16 chromosomes. From her fertilised eggs she can create three distinct female types (who carry 32 chromosomes).