Portugese artist, Susana Soares is doing some science-y work. She’s developed a glass breath chamber for diagnosing disease with honeybees. You can read more here.
Do you remember the heart shaped swarm I posted about earlier this summer? Its keeper, Mary Holt, was kind enough to send an update and it looks like the bees are safely ensconced in their new home in the English Cotswolds. Thought you’d enjoy these photos.
This first image of three freshly painted beehives is my favorite. I love the way the organic stuff on the right points to the hives on the left… and the way the building’s structure draws your eye toward the flowering bush in back. Lovingly managed chaos… the secret to every garden’s beauty.
(Click to enlarge.)
Mary says…. These are English W.B.C.’s, (invented at the turn of the last century by the Rev.William Broughton Carr) which form a double-skinned hive. The ‘National’ hive which you correctly located on Thorne’s website, will fit inside the WBC outer ‘lifts’. Unlike your crisp, dry-cold climate in the Colorado mountains, I live on a cold but damp exposed hillside, 750ft above sea-level, and felt the extra insulation of a double-skinned hive might help the bees come through winter safely.Â
On a rare warm day, Mr. Crabtree came and we transferred the bees with their brood frames from his National hive to my own. The operation went very smoothly and the bees remained extremely calm throughout.
Oh, man… this is gorgeous. Giant honeybees (apis dorsata) doing “the wave” in a spiral formation. The behavior is called “shimmering” and the bees use it to defend their colony against hornet attacks.
Here’s the article with links to more video. Thanks to my dear friend, Abby Wright, for the heads up.
More great news for the bee-interested in Boulder, Colorado! The Boulder County Beekeepers’ Association is again offering its annual beekeeping class starting this October 7th.
Topics include:
A Beginner’s Year
The History of Beekeeping in Colorado
Honey Bee Biology
Bees & Wasps of Colorado
Honey Bee Pests, Predators & Diseases
The Impact and Importance of Pollination
The Hardware of Beekeeping
Alternative Approaches to Beekeeping
The Beekeeper’s Year
I took this class in 2000 and it’s wonderful. Engrossing. Comprehensive. A great way to connect with the beekeeping community here in Boulder. Highly, highly recommended.
It’s times like this, when the human world feels unsteady, that I take comfort in the abundance made by honeybees. Here’s a picture of our garden from this morning. There’s a zucchini, some carrots and chard in the front with some just-ripening tomatoes, peppers and a few spent okra plants bringing up the rear.
And it’s honey season! Flowing. Flowering. We extracted our 2008 crop over Labor Day weekend with the help of family and friends. Maybe I’m being naive… But it’s hard to work up too much world-news anxiety at harvest time. As Marge McClellan said rightly in Sister Bee… “It’s all just so… BEAUTIFUL!”
Honey lovers in Colorado are invited to taste our honey at the Boulder Farmers’ Market on Wednesday evenings and Saturday mornings now through the end of September.
May your cupboards be blessed with abundance this fall.
William L. Coggshall and Roger A. Morse’s Beeswax: Production, Harvesting, Processing and Products is an excellent resource for artists who want to understand the science and process behind beeswax production in detail. It’s got comprehensive information about the physical properties of wax, harvesting, testing, bleaching and a thirteen page chapter on the uses of beeswax in art and industry.
Check out the two electron photomicrographs of beeswax scales on page 34. Gorgeous, eh? (The layers just slay me.)
Isn’t beeswax beautiful!?! It’s harvest time and we (actually… he)
are busy rendering the last of our in-house wax in preparation for the new to come in. It’s an abundant time of year.
Beeswax comes in a range of colors from lemon yellow to golden brown. The lightest wax is cappings wax. That’s the new wax in the hive that the bees use to cap over their honey. The darkest wax is from the brood chamber. It’s older wax from the part of the hive where the bees live and raise their young all year round. The golden color comes from the footprints of thousands of bees tracking pollen and propolis around on their tiny feet. I treasure all the colors. The lightest wax makes a beautiful painting medium with high translucency. The darker wax makes richly fragrant candles.
If you’re a painter or cosmetics maker seeking a high grade source of local beeswax ask your neighborhood beekeeper for cappings wax. He or she will know exactly what you mean.
One of the compelling subjects Michael Schacker tackles in A Spring without Bees is the perplexing way colony collapse disorder has been covered by the U.S. media.
Here’s a quote: Rather than giving CCD the serious investigation that it deserves, the U.S. media sometimes has even presented the ongoing catastrophe as a joke or an oddball type of story.
And another: In a syrupy tone of voice usually reserved for the birth of baby pandas, CNN newswoman Frederica Whitfield exclaimed, “Where have all the honey bees gone?” “No one knows” was the answer given in her report. In light of having just studied the history of the French IMD/honey bee controversy, watching the broadcast was a surreal moment. Nowhere had the media reported the true history of the insecticide battle in France, especially omitting the fact that the French bees came back in 2005. Colony collapse disorder is typically presented as a mystery in the U.S., a puzzle that no one on Earth can definitively give the answer to.
Hmm… There are clear reasons why those with money to lose would prefer CCD to stay shrouded in mystery. It’s less clear why the media, especially TV and video, haven’t done a better job exploding the mystery meme.
As a person with a foot in each world – beekeeping and filmmaking – this is especially interesting to me. Here are three reasons why I think TV media has so far failed to report the full story about pesticides and CCD.
THE MYSTERY IS SEDUCTIVE
There’s something about the CCD mystery story that’s… seductive. The idea that our honeybees are – poof – disappearing has a dark magic about it. It alludes to all the things that make us anxious about the environment while rendering us helpless.
SCIENTISTS ARE MORE CREDIBLE THAN BEEKEEPERS
So far, the story U.S. scientists are telling about CCD (that it’s a tough-to-crack mystery with multiple causes) is different from the story some beekeepers are telling (that there’s a problem with the crops bees are foraging on and it looks like pesticides). Both speak from observation. But their conclusions are different. Whom to believe? My guess is that a soft spoken scientist riding the research train is going to sound more credible to a university trained filmmaker than an impassioned beekeeper. Both may be interviewed. But the scientist’s side gets more weight.
Why scientists & beekeepers aren’t quite matching up is another story… better told by Schacker in A Spring without Bees.
NO JOURNALISM DEGREE REQUIRED
Stories get told differently on TV than they do in print. (Filmmakers are more story-arc oriented than newspaper reporters are.) Documentary filmmakers may care about truth and approach the facts of a story with the same time and care as a newspaper reporter but arrive at the process with a different point of view and training.
So you throw those three things together… a culturally potent story told by a story-sensitive filmmaker with pro-scientist bias and you get…
Fall is nigh. Here in Boulder, Colorado we’re having our second consecutive day of cool temperatures and desperately needed rain. Can I stave off winter with this warming picture of summertime bees flying toward the hive? Probably not. But it makes me feel good to see them.
Yikes! It looks like officials in my hometown – Boulder, Colorado – are recommending imidacloprid (IMD) for black walnut trees besieged by the black walnut twig beetle. This doesn’t bode well for honeybees. According to the research Michael Schacker cites in “A Spring Without Bees” IMD sprayed on soil and seeds can show up in next year’s pollen and nectar resulting in colony collapse when these foods are gathered & eaten by honeybees.
This is a concern. Will let you know when I find out more.
Welcome and announcements
CCD update
The cell punch method of queen rearing
Insurance for beekeepers
Nosema Cerane and Nosema Apis
A model bee breeding plan for sideline beekeepers
Living with the African honeybee
American Foulbrood: identification, eradication and control
Scrapbooking for beekeepers
Laying workers in the hive
Basic hive inspection
Factors affecting drone production
Raising your own queens
Reading the frames for better hive management
Using Apiguard for mite control
Cooking with honey
Making beekeeping equipment
The art of making beeswax candles
Bee beard – how to do one and why
How to move bees safely
Bee friendly insect control in the home landscape
What Brushy Moutain has to offer in equipment and supplies
Building a honey house from the floor up
Starting a master beekeeping program in your state
The Lost Mountain Honey Project
Beekeeping in South Africa
IPM for varroa mite control
Swarm control and splits
Using bricks to mark your hive’s condition
More on CCD problems
The classroom questions and answers
Beekeeping 101
Allegany protocol for saving the bees
Adding wax to plastic brood foundation – bees will pull it out fast and perfect
How to use everyday or inexpensive items in beekeeping
Hive scale to check honey build-up and the change in the calendar date
Greeting and gift cards and tags
Over-wintering nucs
What’s in your comb?
Dinner meeting HAS executive board
We Are Marshall movie
Where are the African bees now? Sister Bee movie
Overview of instrumental insemination
Scrapbooking for beekeepers
Finding the queen
Learn the ins and outs of making Sister Bee movie
Making beekeepingi equipment
Autoclave: the best treatment for AFB equipment
Getting bees ready for pollination
Using small hive beetle traps
Selection & breeding of hardy queen stock
Teaching bees to school students
Queen banking
What’s new with the Walter Kelley Company
Keeping the Buckfast queens on the market
Weighing the hive day to day
Building a good bee club
Homemade honey ice cream social with bluegrass band
Queen quality
Pollen Nation movie
How to market your honey and wax
Quick snacks made with honey
Laying workers in the hive
Why nucs?
Information and help for the beginning beekeeper
Making splits to increase your numbers
Back care for beekeepers
Grand prize drawing
A few of these would make great novel titles. Can you guess which ones I mean?
Sister Bee was just one of sixty-plus events offered at HAS this year. I wish I could have attended all of them! Alas… time and space limited me to the few. Thought you’d enjoy hearing about these standout honeybee projects.
LOST MOUNTAIN HONEY PROJECT Tammy Horn who authored “Bees in America” has begun an ambitious new project. The Lost Mountain Honey Project is opening new space for forests and honeybees by linking beekeepers with coal companies and private donors. They’re turning defunct mining sites into productive apiary forests and training grounds for new beekeepers. Beautiful, eh?
BEEKEEPING SAFARI
Second generation beekeeper and Ntaba Tours owner & guide Robin Mountain is offering a Beekeeping Safari to South Africa this December. Robin is one one of the first people I met a HAS. He’s a great storyteller. The itinerary looks fantastical. (I love the idea of a tour that makes time for picnics, penguin colonies, leopard gazing and honeybees.)
A STUDY ON CLIMATE CHANGE AND HONEYBEES
Curious about climate change and honeybees? NASA scientist and beekeeper Dr. Wayne Esaias is gathering information about “how climate change is affecting flowering plants and their pollinators” by observing honey flows. He’s actively seeking volunteers. A big ol’ scale and honeybees required. Get involved at HoneyBeeNet.
Big thanks to Dan O’Hanlon and Gabe Blatt of the Cabell Wayne Beekeepers Association in West Virginia for inviting me to screen Sister Bee at HAS last week. What a wonderful experience! The people, the setting, the workshops… all beautiful. I feel blessed to have participated. Will write more later this week…
is an excellent resource for artists who want to understand the science and process behind beeswax production in detail. It’s got comprehensive information about the physical properties of wax, harvesting, testing, bleaching and a thirteen page chapter on the uses of beeswax in art and industry.
is the perplexing way colony collapse disorder has been covered by the U.S. media.
