A few places have become available on the course taking place on Feb 25th.
This one day classroom course is an ideal introduction to beekeeping run by two experienced beekeepers from Pembrokeshire Beekeepers’ Association.
Included in the course fee of £35 are handouts and a CD with the slides used during the day for you to take away. This is your chance to decide if you want to find out more, ask questions and make contact with beekeepers in our county.
Click here for more details.
With white granulated sugar becoming more expensive, many beekeepers are turning to specialist alternatives with Ambrosia Bee Food being very popular. The product is specially formulated for bees by its manufacturers in Germany, the sugar used comes from sugar beet apparently but which has been processed using enzymes to produce a feed which is very close to nectar, will not ferment or otherwise degrade and is highly acceptable to the bees.
Unlike many products sold for bees this one seems to work. Ricky Wilson uses it in his queen rearing colonies and reports good results with rapid colony buid up. He is also planning to obtain a bulk supply for sale, in smaller quantities, to members – will let you know more about this when we have details. Frank Gellatly also reported good results when we were discussing this after our AGM.
You can read more about the product in this helpful brochure from the manufacturer.
According to this story on the BBC News website listening to what is going on the hive may help work out what is going on and, more importantly, assist with diagnosis of hive health or swarming. Interestingly enough this story appears in their Technology section and not Science/Environment. Also interesting, to me, is that the recorder is describes as being ‘about the size of an iPhone’ or an HTC Galaxy I guess, or almost any other smartphone but then Apple would have tried to sue – now you know it is a technology story, and it shows how we have moved on. In the old days it probably would have been described as being about the size of a pack of 20 cigarettes!
Will this story ever develop and appear again? Forgive me if I am cynical about this.
In the meantime we suggest you keep carrying out those inspections.
For all you ‘tech heads’ who are not afraid of the internet and modern technology – here is one for you! This is an application called ‘Beetight’, that can be accessed from your PC and, for the paid version, from Apple or Android Smart Phones or Tablets, and which apparently will keep records of all your inspections, photos of your hives, treatments, diseases, etc. A free service is available for those with up to six hives while the whole package costs $15 just over £9 a year. I succumbed to temptation early in December 2011. I have entered all the hives in so far and plan on using it next year to see how well it works in practice. It is designed primarily for US users – one of the mandatory inspection points relates to Africanised bees for example. There are options to include or exclude other questions for example to notes relating to swarm or supercedure cells.
The link to their website if you are interested is https://www.beetight.com/
Paul Eades, Apiary Manager 9/12/2011
Updated and republished by John Dudman, PBKA Webmaster 25/1/2012 who has signed up for the free version.
Pembrokeshire Beekeepers' Association 