Scott Hildenbrand expounded:

You're packed full of information on bees, do you keep them? Always
wanted to just for the fun factor more than anything.

Yes, we've got hives here, at my mother's a few towns over, and at our
home up in Maine. It is fun, fascinating, and the honey I get from my
gardens is fantastic - a mixture of whatever they find in the wild and
the herbs and flowers I've got all over. Haven't extracted the honey
from the hives in Maine, that's a project for this weekend.

We're going to seed the yard with clover this spring and I've got tons
of planting to do to improve the yard.. It's funny though since we live
in front of a sub devision.. They all have 'lawns'.. I like to pick the
dandelions and blow them their direction..

I've let the dandelions go wild in the backyard, they're everywhere,
but it turns out they aren't a great nectar source - they do bloom
before most everything else, so they're worth having, but just until
other blooms start. The protein in the pollen is incomplete, too. I
guess no one told the girls that, however, they seem to love the
dandies!
--
Ann, gardening in Zone 6a
South of Boston, Massachusetts
e-mail address is not checked
******************************

Ann wrote:
enigma expounded:

oddly, that's not true. there are very few 'wild' hives of
honeybees.

Thankfully they seem to be on a bit of a comeback. There have been
feral hives located that show resistance to varroa. There may be hope
- that is if humans will leave them alone and let them adapt!

I was reading something in one of the "Mother Country Backwoods Grit
News" magazines about, by breeding the ferocity out of bees, we've also
bred out their ability to fight back against mites, etc.

on that note, is there a way to encourage wild hives to take
up residence? would the wandering new queen be looking for a
particular type of spot?

Wandering queens do like to settle in places that have held bees previously.

enigma expounded:

on that note, is there a way to encourage wild hives to take
up residence? would the wandering new queen be looking for a
particular type of spot?

Got any hollow trees? Actually, you can put up swarm boxes and use
lemon balm rubbed inside to attract swarms in season, usually mid to
late spring. Then have a complete hive ready to put them in. Swarms
are kinda neat, they tend to not sting (that's not an absolute)
because they've engorged themselves wit honey and can't bend to insert
the stinger - also, they have no home to defend, their only concern is
finding a new home for themselves and their all-important queen..

Anyways, become a beekeeper, it's fun, it goes nicely with gardening
and farming, and the honey (which is really the secondary economic use
of honeybees, pollination is the first) is a wonderful byproduct.
--
Ann, gardening in Zone 6a
South of Boston, Massachusetts
e-mail address is not checked
******************************

doofy expounded:

I was reading something in one of the "Mother Country Backwoods Grit
News" magazines about, by breeding the ferocity out of bees, we've also
bred out their ability to fight back against mites, etc.

The Africanized bees deal with them well, it has to do with the length
of the brood cycle, the AFH's brood time is shorter, so the varroa
don't have time to mature before the new bee hatches. We may have
bread the ferocity out of the bees, or we may have continued lines of
bees that can't withstand and/or deal with the varroa, but that's
changing, hygenic bees are being bred that both groom the varroa off
better and that kill and remove infested pupa, thus controlling the
mites themselves. As I said in another post, another point of view is
to not treat at all, and let the susceptible bees die off, hopefully
encouraging natural selection to let the stronger bee develop (not
economically feasible if your income depends on bees). There's quite
a bit going on in the honeybee world, it's a small world, but many are
trying to make things right.
--
Ann, gardening in Zone 6a
South of Boston, Massachusetts
e-mail address is not checked
******************************

On Nov 15, 8:40 pm, Ann wrote:
doofy expounded:

I was reading something in one of the "Mother Country Backwoods Grit
News" magazines about, by breeding the ferocity out of bees, we've also
bred out their ability to fight back against mites, etc.

The Africanized bees deal with them well, it has to do with the length
of the brood cycle, the AFH's brood time is shorter, so the varroa
don't have time to mature before the new bee hatches. We may have
bread the ferocity out of the bees, or we may have continued lines of
bees that can't withstand and/or deal with the varroa, but that's
changing, hygenic bees are being bred that both groom the varroa off
better and that kill and remove infested pupa, thus controlling the
mites themselves. As I said in another post, another point of view is
to not treat at all, and let the susceptible bees die off, hopefully
encouraging natural selection to let the stronger bee develop (not
economically feasible if your income depends on bees). There's quite
a bit going on in the honeybee world, it's a small world, but many are
trying to make things right.
--
Ann, gardening in Zone 6a
South of Boston, Massachusetts
e-mail address is not checked
******************************

Would it make sense to install a hive, bring in some bees, and just
leave it alone, not harvesting honey or wax -- just give them a place
to live and to pollinate the area?

cheers

oz

enigma wrote:

Jim wrote:
[....]

these are not the kind of bees you put in hives. I was
within a couple of feet of them and still used the zoom on
my camera.

why? bumblebees are very laid back & passive. you can pick
them up if you do it slowly as not to startle them & they will
crawl on your hands.

good question as well as a good observation concerning
the character of this particular species of bee. they
are rather good natured and have exhibited the most
civilized mannerisms of all the different bee types I'm
familiar with.

a speculation on my part would be, maybe the honey
is not the most desirable?

'if' your why was more directed towards my having used the
zoom on the camera? the use had more to do with my desire
to obtain a clear close-up picture by working within the
constraints of the technical limits where the camera's ability
to focus is restricted by the movement of the subject matter
at distances of less then one foot. in other words, the wind
was blowing and the bush was moving and the bees were flying
in and out as well.

took me awhile to learn how to use that camera. my most recent
accomplishment was learning how to set the camera to capture a
picture of me using an arc welder. in my previous attempts, my
failure to understand aperture settings in conjunction with shutter
speeds had spoiled the outcome. setting a goal and then obtaining
it is often a rewarding experience.

another good pollinator bee is the Orchard bee. i have lots
of those around & one of my winter projects will be building
orchard bee condos (they live in little holes, so a chunk of
wood with a grid of holes hanging on a tree or the side of a
building near the gardens pleases them)
lee

each year during the summer, down at the barn, the boring
bees show up and bore the most perfectly round holes in
the rafters of the shelter. I don't think I could drill
a hole anymore perfectly round than they can. they look
in appearance just like the ones in the pictures I posted
the link towards and in no way resemble the species known
as the carpenter bee who gains the name as a result of their
boring in wood to create their homes.

best 2U Lee,
Jim

"Ann" wrote in message
...
enigma expounded:

oddly, that's not true. there are very few 'wild' hives of
honeybees.

Thankfully they seem to be on a bit of a comeback. There have been
feral hives located that show resistance to varroa. There may be hope
- that is if humans will leave them alone and let them adapt!
--

There's tons of feral hives in the Portland metro area. There's a
lot of people that track the locations of fruit trees in Portland, there
are hundreds if not thousands of apple, plum and pear trees and
this year we had an excellent pear and plum harvest from them,
as well as apples. We have a hibiscus and apple in our yard (
the apple is young and isn't producing yet) and I was watching the
bees visiting the hibiscus all summer. You can bet that there are no
commercial beekeepers who are going around making sure the
fruit trees in the downtown area are being pollenated! I also bought
fruit from several hobby farmers in the outer metro area and none
of them paid for beekeepers but they all saw plenty of bees this summer.

Ted

"Eggs Zachtly" wrote in message
...
Ann said:

enigma expounded:

oddly, that's not true. there are very few 'wild' hives of
honeybees.

Thankfully they seem to be on a bit of a comeback. There have been
feral hives located that show resistance to varroa. There may be hope
- that is if humans will leave them alone and let them adapt!

My money's on some lab, somewhere, creating a varroa-proof bee. You know
what they say about history and it's repeats.


My money is on nature. My armchair quarterbacking is that since so
many commercial beekeepers are buying queens that there is likely
only a handful of suppliers who are breeding and boxing up queens, and
a few of them have a problem - they got themselves a genetic
defect or some such that has infested their production hives and nobody
is willing to publically admit it because they don't want their business
to collapse.

Sooner or later once enough data is gathered, they will trace it down
to a cause, by then my guess is the queen suppliers will have a fix applied
and you will see a bunch of stonewalling and denials from the industry,
and it will be back to business as usual.

Ted

Jim expounded:


good question as well as a good observation concerning
the character of this particular species of bee. they
are rather good natured and have exhibited the most
civilized mannerisms of all the different bee types I'm
familiar with.

As Lar said, they're good-natured as long as you don't disturb their
nest. Then they'll chase you down for quite a distance! And they
don't die when they sting you, they live to do it again.

a speculation on my part would be, maybe the honey
is not the most desirable?

It's as tasty as honeybee honey, but it's stored in a much different
manner, and they don't stockpile it the way honeybees do, so
harvesting it is much more difficult.

http://www.puyallup.wsu.edu/plantcli...bumblebees.pdf
--
Ann, gardening in Zone 6a
South of Boston, Massachusetts
e-mail address is not checked
******************************

MajorOz expounded:

Would it make sense to install a hive, bring in some bees, and just
leave it alone, not harvesting honey or wax -- just give them a place
to live and to pollinate the area?

It would be an interesting experiment.

Some of the beeks in our club have had hives that have lasted five or
six years that haven't been treated-those would be good hives to take
splits from. That's what you want to look for, a local beek who has
had his hives live through several winters or more. Catching a swarm
would be good, but you have no idea where that swarm came from unless
there's someone nearby keeping bees - even then there's no guarantee.
--
Ann, gardening in Zone 6a
South of Boston, Massachusetts
e-mail address is not checked
******************************