Acarine disease is something to look for in the spring when colonies may fail to build up properly. Look out for large numbers of crawling bees on the ground and/or a pile of dead bees beneath the entrance – these are signs of chronic bee paralysis virus (CBPV) which is often present when the bees have Acarine. They may also have ‘K wings’. This is where the bees hold their fore-wings at strange angles so they look like a letter K. The bee has has four wings, two on each side; they are zipped together for flight and unzipped but folded together in a relaxed sort of way otherwise. With K wings it’s as if the wings are broken and the fore-wings are held out at right angles.
Dysentery is more of a disorder than a disease as there seems to be no causative organism. It is where the gut fills with more fluid than the bee can handle and the primary sign or symptom is when the fronts of the hives and sometimes even the insides of the hives are all spattered with skittery bee crap. Continue reading Dysentery→
The garden heathers are in bloom now and the bees are all over them whenever the weather allows. These are not to be confused with the Ling heather (Calluna vulgaris) we see on the hills in the late summer – they are all Erica species, mostly varieties of Erica carnea or E.cinerea. Erica specialists please correct me here. Continue reading Garden Heathers→
European Foulbrood (EFB) used to be quite rare in Ireland but it reared its ugly head a couple of years ago when it was discovered in hives at the annual Beekeeping Course at Gormanston so it’s out there and you need to be aware of it! Continue reading European Foulbrood (EFB)→
The diseases of honey bee brood are many and varied but they’re all a bit dark and creepy – like Roald Dahl’s child catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
The two most serious brood diseases are American Foul Brood and European Foul Brood and these strike fear in heart of all beekeepers but we’ll deal with them later.
On a filthy February day like this, when the rain keeps coming down and you’re harbouring a horrible virus, spring seems a long way away. Summer even further, so lets pretend it’s July, the sun is slanting through the trees and the bees are spiralling out of their hives like little golden bullets – the limes are in bloom, there is work to do and the tree tops are buzzing…
There are three castes in a honeybee colony: the queen, the worker and the drone. There is only one queen per colony and she will live for about three years. During her reign there are numerous workers although the numbers of workers per colony fluctuates with the seasons reaching a peak in early summer and dwindling to a minimum in the depths of winter. In the early summer the colony begins to produce drones who emerge to live the life of Reilly until the end of the season when they are forcibly evicted to die in hungry heaps in the long grass.
The details of the control of the complicated demographics of the honeybee colony are for another day! Only the mechanisms of how the colony manages to produce three castes from two sorts of egg will be dealt with below. Continue reading Bee Basics – Metamorphosis→
The scientific name for Horse Chestnut is Aesculus hippocastanum but that’s a bit of a mouthful for the familiar conker tree. The common name came about for several reasons:
The seeds or ‘conkers’ and the spikey seed pods are similar in appearance to those of the sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa). It should be noted that unlike chestnuts, conkers are not for human consumption;
When the leaves fall in autumn the twigs bear a horseshoe-shaped scar including marks like nail holes where the tiny vessels in the leaf stem part company;
At one time horse chestnuts were ground and fed to horses as a stimulant and to make their coats shine. The Turks used to believe conker-meal could cure broken-winded horses.
The Latin name Aesculus comes from a word that was originally applied to a type of oak but when Linnaeus the botanist drew up his original classification of species he gave it instead to the horse chestnut. ‘Hippo’ is Greek for horse, which also explains hippopotamus – meaning ‘river horse’. Meanwhile ‘kastanos‘ means chestnut. Continue reading Bee Trees – Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum)→
I was reading an article about wintering bees and the author said any fool could winter bees, whatever the winter and however poor the beekeeper. And he has a point. The reason being that in order to successfully winter bees you just have to leave them alone. Leave them alone – they know more about it than you do. Well he might be right but if you keep an eye on your bees there are things to be done to prevent the losses we saw in the winter of 2012/13. Continue reading Things to do in February→
Choosing which type of hive to use is like getting married – get it right from the start and stick to it; if you go messing about later, it will come back to bite you and you’ll regret it. Not all hive parts are interchangeable and you’ll end up in a right mucking fuddle. Continue reading Bee Basics – Which Beehive?→
