Recent content by Anthony Appleyard

Near open fresh water that has wildlife, how many losses are likely due to dragonflies and damselflies? How many losses due to birds (e.g. swallows and swifts and similar) that catch insects while flying?

Farmers say that "the bull is half the herd". Likewise it could be said that "the drones that a virgin queen mates with, are half of her future hive".

The queenless hive presumably still had brood and workers to tend them, but no eggs or larvae young enough to become a queen. The beekeeper likely transplanted more than one queen cell.

How often does a beekeeper fínd a hive "hopelessly queenless" and remedy the matter by transplanting a single queen cell with a queen egg or queen larva in, or two or more at a time? In a book about beekeeping about the 1960's I read that at the end-of-winter cleanout a beekeeper was watching a...

If the normal heat of its operation melts its trigger, that looks like bad design or bad construction. Write to its suppliers complaining and pointing out the law about quality of goods offered for sale.

Lay off. People want serious sensible answers.

Likely, as long as flying virgin queens are allowed to find their own husbands in the air, the bee stock in Britain will gradually evolve back to what survives best in British climate, or in the climate of their area, including foraging and stocking plenty of honey to survive long hard winters...

Once in front of a house in my street I saw a man spray-painting his car, and to keep the paint spray out of his lungs, he had on not a filter mask, but an absolute classical cloth mouth-and-nose gag straight from a crime comic, complete with the noise when he tried to talk through it. It is the...

Snow in Manchester, unusual because with wind in east we are in rain shadow of the Pennines and west wind is wet but too warm to snow. It has melted.

Goosegrass - Wikipedia Galium aparine - Wikipedia

Oh yes, those storage heaters with allegedly special heat-absorbing bricks in. They sold a big lot of them, then they raused the night price of electricity to match the day price. I read about one man who in the end used all his "special" bricks to make an enclosure for his compost heap. Storage...

See link: Chronic bee paralysis virus - Wikipedia

("This" = acronyms.) Same with me. Bees evolved to collect nectar, not alphabet soup. Same as, scuba diving has got full of acronyms; when I started scuba diving, I dived in water, not in alphabet soup.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocimene

Presumably the money symbols (dollar, yen, euro) in that lot, represent the expense of beekeeping. :-)