Recent content by alisonfosterbell

Thank you! It looks very interesting! I'm not too concerned about pollen coefficients and ratios but more as to the plants foraged. I would say 99.9% of my customers want to know the flowers! I note what is in flower each week by observation to give a broad picture. My bees and I live in the...

Thank you for your excellent advice!

Brilliant thank you! And where could i get an atlas of pollen grain shapes for identification?

Hi there is it possible with a basic light microscope to identify pollen types at home? I'd love to be able to say to my customers more precisely which flowers were foraged.

Maybe it was Bitter Honey from arbousiers ("srrawberry tree") ? It tastes of coffee, burnt caramel and liquorice! White flowers in corsica italy spain portugal. Stanley Tucci once did a programme with pig roasted on a spit slathered in this amazing honey!

Here in Picardy the ivy flowers are still tightly budded. At long last, we will have a week of summer weather: in the fields by my apiary are buckwheat, late sunflowers and phacelia.

A-ha perhaps you can advise me! A friend gave me a bit of her hop plant a couple of years ago. This summer it flowered for tge first time but...no cones! Just tiny flowers full of dusty pollen. Are these male flowers? How could this happen if its from a plant which has cones?

Hi there! I too am an apicultrice (in Picardy) with 3 hives in my third season! A huge flow of honey despite the drought conditions (hooray 9.5 mm rain last night, first rain for over a month!!) as we are between a huge forest and the plain with sunflowers (smothered with bees) and buckwheat. I...

Ice cold in Alex. Best film ever.

The bees are collecting pollen on the hellebores on the warm (16°) New Year's Eve here in Picardy

With icing sugar and orange juice.

Yummy! I love nonettes but I prefer the glazed version!

A most interesting read Mikael, thank you. I would like to go to 50% and then 100% honey winter feeding. Would it be a good policy to jar up only, say, 50% of each extraction and to set aside the other 50% for winter feeding in the apiary? That way, if the year is bountiful, one can see the...

Why are beekeepers treating with Oxalic Acid now? I'm a novice so please put me right! I understood that OA is only effective when there is little/minimal/no brood, as the so called phoretic mites (who are piggybacking on the bees and so not reproducing and easier to kill). Before OA treatment...

Absolutely! I'm in Northern France and my colonies have hardly put their noses out for 7 weeks to forage. There are Asian Hornets hunting outside each colony all day long. I've put cages over the entrances, I've put out lots of traps (white wine, stout and sweet syrup), I go regularly (though...