The varroa threshold

Timothy the beekeeper answered on my Facebook post about this blog: 'All of my hives are due for a varroa treatment in the next 2-3 weeks. As a beekeeper I try and keep infestation levels below a 1000 varroa threshold that means that I try to never let there be more than 1000 varroa in any hive. Problem is they double in numbers every few weeks. It forces me to have to put chemicals into my beehives. But if I don't my bees will die so it is the best of a bad choice.'The bag with Varroa poison looks a bit like a feedbag and it is also put on top of the frames

Clew Bay Honey’s First Birthday

Message from Timothy Stevens beekeeper to among many others the Polranny Pirates. ‘Hi everyone. Sorry for such infrequent posts. Things tend to get a bit hectic in the summer with me. So here is a quick update no photos I’m afraid as I scratched the lens on the camera I use. I hope to get that sorted out soon and start getting more pics up. I celebrated my 1st year in business on the 20th of June. The year has truly flown for me. To think last year I was registering for tax and getting my company name sorted. The list of what has been achieved from then to now is massive. I started this with 19 hives and now have over 35 full hives and close to 40 nucs(half hives). I am well on line with meeting and surpassing my own goals for this year for growth. All I need now is 3 good weeks weather in July (a big ask I know) and I will be able to get honey into a few more shops.’ Congratulations to Timothy and hopefully the Polranny Pirate Bees will surpass themselves in supplying Clew Bay Honey! I’m going to Amsterdam now and I’ll be away for a few months. Most likely it will be very quiet on the blog for a while. The bees will be busy making honey and I shall miss all the fun.

Ballycroy National Park

Yesterday I took Maureen and Monika, two friends from the OWLs who are staying in the Folly, for a visit to Ballycroy, the Ballycroy National Park and Visitors Center. There I asked the staff if they were thinking about getting bees. No, but they will have a talk the first half of August by a beekeeper from Westport. When we came back I saw that Timothy the beekeeper had put another storey on one of the hives. A sign that things are going well with the Polranny Pirate Bees! I asked Timothy and he answered this: ‘The bees seem to be growing well. They also have adequate stores which is encouraging as this time of the year is usually an issue. I think clover might be a bit early and sycamore which is all but finished certainly was late. The Visitor Centre is a nice spot. It’s probably Henry Horkan who’ll give the talk. Well worth a listen if you are interested he is quite knowledgeable.’

Honey and wax harvesting in Ancient Egypt

In contrast to many other customs in Ancient Egypt the harvesting of honey and wax are a bit of a mystery. There is a picture on the wall of a temple about how the hive was evacuated. Smoke was blown into the back of the hive and the bees escaped through the entrance in the front. The rest is conjecture, but in Egypt traditions rarely change and it is pretty safe to suppose that neither has beekeeping. To harvest the honey the combs are gathered in a cow skin. Next the combs are crushed by treading on the skin. Through a hole the honey now flows into a container. What is left in the skin is washed out with a bit of water. Finally the honey passes through a sieve made of blades of grass. What’s left in the skin is the wax. The wax is heated to melting point in a water bath to prevent it from catching fire. Impurities floating on the surface of the liquid wax can be scooped up. Afterwards it is strained and put into a bag press. It has been estimated that for every kilo of honey somewhat more than sixty grams of wax can be won.

Beekeeping in Ancient Egypt

Apiculture was popular in the whole of Egypt but particular in the Delta region. Hives were made of mud or reeds covered with mud. Empty hives were also used as wall insulation of houses. The cylindrical hives were stacked horizontally, sometimes up to 500 together. The harvesting was done twice a year: in spring and autumn. Because of the climate there seem to have been no winter hibernation. The hives were transported to where the flowers were. They had to be moved again when the farmers were clearing the ground by fire after harvest or when the Nile water rose and it was necessary to bring the hives to higher ground. The moving could cause some logistic problems especially when there were many hives involved. It is all written down in queries, prayers and petitions and mercifully kept for prosperity. The drawing is of fields on the banks of the Nile and two huge statues near Luxor

Bees in Ancient Egypt: Bee between the knees

The drawing I made in 1982 in the temple of Karnak. Surprise, surprise: a bee is visible between the knees of the Pharao. Ancient Egyptians celebrated the divinity of nature not only in temples but also on the walls of other structures. They did it in sculpture, in relief and in painting. The method was everywhere the same. In detail, with great skill and knowledge of the subject they depicted nature in all its forms: but always from the same point of view. They did not care about perspective or direction. They wanted the world to recognize immediately what it saw. That’s why Egyptologists came to know so much about what grew, flew and flowered. Apart from making art, the ancient Egyptians also did a lot of writing. Again it was done on walls but also on potshards and paper they made from papyrus reeds. They used a kind of pictogram based alphabet: hieroglyphs. Everyday business was recorded on shards, letters were written on paper and religious and official messages were chiselled into walls and pillars. That’s how knowledge about apiculture was as vivid then as it is now. Polranny Pirate in house Egyptologist Bert wrote: ‘The oldest pictures of nature in all its glory and in detail, as far as we know, was on the walls of the sun temple of Pharao Niuserre. He ruled in the days of the builders of the Pyramids almost 5000 years ago. It was maybe also the first time aspects of apiculture were shown.‘

Bees in Ancient Egypt: Divine nature

The people living on the shores of the Nile enjoyed the fertile shore and all that nature brought. But they were also sensitive to and reliant on the seasons: especially the rainfall in far-away central Africa where they had no power over nor knowledge of. And then there was the desert directly adjacent to the crops, where nothing could grow but harboured all kinds of scary things, both animal and human. No wonder that the religion of the Egyptians was nature fixated; not like our own religions that are human centred. Everything they had no power over the Egyptians considered sacred: possessed of divine powers, even the house cat. And the bees, which brought honey: the only sweetener the ancient Egyptians had. The picture was taken inside one of the many decorated tombs of ancient Egypt. A farmer is kneeling in front of his beehives. Again: thanks to Polranny Pirate Bert the Egyptologist

Bees in Ancient Egypt: All about location

Egypt in ancient times was a prosperous place, with its own religion and a highly developed apiculture. It had all to do with the Nile. The river Nile falls from high up in the middle of Africa down at a fast pace. It only slows down when it reaches Egypt. There it flows slowly and majestically through the desert. All the sediment the river took with it on its travel north settles in the calmer waters to the bottom. This was clearly visible after the seasonal inundations when fertilizing mud covered the fields. The Nile Delta where the river meets the Mediterranean See consists completely of sediment. The sediment made the land on both sides of the Nile very fertile and made the inundations both frightful and welcome. These shores rich in nature and protected from the surrounding world by desert were ideal for a sedentary existence of agriculture. With the agriculture came the beekeeping. (Thanks to Bert Hogervorst Egyptologist and Polranny Pirate)

Bees in Ancient Egypt: He that Belongs to the Bee

Beekeeping is as old as written history and probably much older. Egyptologist and Polranny Pirate Bert wrote to the Blog about bees in ancient Egypt. Bees were considered holy and royal, which has the same status in Pharaonic Egypt. Bees were traditionally kept in the Delta of the Nile. The Delta was part of the kingdom of Lower Egypt. Together with the kingdom of Upper Egypt it formed the double crown the Pharao wore. The official title that went with the kingdom of Lower Egypt was: ‘he that belongs to the bee’. The word bee bi.t.y in the old Egyptian lingo stood for Lower Egypt. The t was probably dropped when it was pronounced and sounded like the English word bee. Because of its holy/royal status pictures of bees appear on every surface in every temple. When visiting Egypt you can’t escape them. Photo Internet (I should go and see for myself)

Drones and queens

The queen will fly out on a sunny day to the congregation area and mate with many drones. When she enters the mating zone a cloud of drones will follow her till one gets so close he can move over her flying body and grab on to her. The mating lasts a couple of seconds. The force of the sperm release propels the drone backward and his penis snaps off. That is the end of the drone. No happy returns for him. Considering the short time the mating takes it is amazing that somebody managed to photograph it. My drawing is from a picture I found on the Internet. The queen stores the sperm of this and all the other drones she mates in her spermatheca to be doled out at will. A young virgin queen has a limited time to mate. If she can’t fly because of bad weather she won’t get mated and will lay only unfertilized eggs. She’ll become a drone layer. That is why I’m so worried about the continuing bad weather we’re having. But maybe that delays the virgin queens being born too.

The nucleus or nucs or colony of bees

Bees live in a colony. Timothy the beekeeper calls a small colony a nucleus or nucs. There are three different kinds of bees in a colony: drones, workers and the queen. Each nucleus contains one queen bee: the only egg producing female bee in the hive. Depending on the season there are up to a few thousand drone bees: fertile males and tens of thousands sterile female bees, the worker bees which produce and shape the wax honeycomb on the frame. The queen has a spermatheca, a reproductive organ to receive and store the sperm from drones. Using the sperm selectively she actually choses which of the eggs she lays is fertilized. Drones develop from unfertilized eggs while future queens and worker bees are born out of fertilized eggs. Queen, drones and workers are different from each other. The trained eye of the beekeeper can tell them apart.

What are bees?

It is fun having bees in the garden and being properly impressed by them, but what are they? I went searching for knowledge. Bees or in our case apis mellifera mellifera, are flying insects closely related to wasps and ants. They are important pollinators and produce honey and beeswax. Bees are found on every continent except Antarctica and where ever there are flowering plants. Bees feed on nectar for energy and pollen for nutrients. Most pollen is used for food for larvae. With their long tongue they suck the nectar from the flowers and pollen is gathered via the hind leg. Bees have two pairs of wings and a stinging hook for defense. The best-known bee species is the European honey bee. Ours is a sub species called the native Irish honey bee. Beekeeping is also known as apiculture.

Labeling frames

I could witness the move of the nucleus of one hive to the other from close up thanks to the beekeeper suit I wore. Now I noticed that each of the frames had a sign written with a red marker pen. I asked Timothy the beekeeper what it meant. It was his system for marking the function of the different frames. F stood for Foundation, S for Store and DB for Drone Base. I wasn’t far advanced in the knowledge of the Apiculture in our Apiary to fully understand the meaning, but there is always room for improvement on my part. It was time to take off the beekeeper's suit and go surf the internet.