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Most of the pollen in honey comes from pollen that drops etc from the anthers into the nectaries rather than from pollen brought back to the hive in the corbiculi. One way pollen from wind pollinated flowers ends up in honey is by way of honeydew excreted by aphids and scale insects and...

Some of what you are seeking is found in "Honey" a large tome by Dr Eva Crane . This is an expensive book to buy but maybe you can borrow it from your association library. In section 2 (Characteristics of honey) chapter 5 page 160 there is a table 5.2/2 giving the average composition of...

Removed Apivar strips from 33 modified commercial hives (belonging to a friend) last saturday and from 26 of my double BC nationals yesterday. On both days the sun was shining with air temps of 18 C so decided to also check a few of them to see how much brood they had. Most had no brood...

However the glucose / fructose ratio is such that it granulates quickly so goes viscous soon after extraction

I keep most of my colonies on a double brood system and select queens that can handle my way of working the bees. Therefore by end of April I would expect to find between 12 and 15 frames of brood and this will increase during May to about 14 to 17 frames of brood. My bees are local mongrels...

Went down to the out-apairy on Monday to find a large swarm near the top of a tall tree way way beyond the reach of my 3 piece ladder plus at my age (77yrs next week) there was no way I was going up that tree. So I wondered if I could tempt them down into a bait hive. I set up a 3 story bait...

Limes just opened in my part of south Yorkshire (nearly hundred trees within half a mile of my out apiary ) and the bees are working it (distinct characteristic aroma in the supers).

Really ? I wonder if the bees in the two hives I keep in the back garden know that . They certainly work the Hellabores, crocuses, raspberries, golden rod, cotoneaster, for -get-me knot, apple and pear tree and many more bee plants in my intensely planted but not very large garden and I have a...

Many beekeepers that claim to have very old queens also don't tend to mark queens so can't really prove it! The oldest queen I ever had reached her 4th season. She was used as a breeder queen spending her 3rd and 4th season in a nucleus hive

Demonstrating bees to others without the veil on was quite common practise in the 1970s. This is me in 1975. A gentle colony was chosen and as mentioned by Eyeman, the hive was also moved to bleed off the older flying bees (the potential stingers) which flew back to the original site to join an...

Not lost a colony from starvation in decades (don't tend to see isolation starvation if wintering on double BCs as bees can get to all the combs via the bee space between the boxes) but I do get up to 4 losses most years (from 23 to 30 wintered colonies) due to late supersedures that don't...

I was under the impression that because reduction division occurs in producing the egg plus because cross over can also occur (exchanges of portions of chromosomes between homologous pairs) the resulting drones while possessing only genes inherited from the queen will still be genotypically and...

Many years ago (early 1960s I think) I watched a worcestershire beefarmer with 400 hives sort out which hives to take to fruit farms in the Evesham valley . He got most of his money from providing hives for pollination and would only get paid for queen right colonies (the fruit farmers have the...

At 74 you might be one of the youngest members in some branches of some beekeeping associations!

Is this what you mean? I have always thought this is what I was told was pickled pollen (bee bread) ie cells of lactic preserved pollen

I use Apideas to get my queens mated. I "Demaree" my 25 double-brood colonies as my selected method of swarm prevention. I get my queen cells started (used to be grafted but the last few years I have used Cupkit as I find grafting at my age beyond me) in a 5 frame queenless congested...

I went to my first beekeeping class aged 11 yrs in 1958 , got my first hive in 1959 and kept just two colonies until 1974 when I expanded rapidly up to 25 hives which I have been running ever since, all on double broods. Now aged 76 and with dodgy knees I am finding the lifting/carrying more...

The use of old comb as wax moth bait is not new. I have been doing it for decades ( I have been keeping bees since 1959 and setting up bait hives since 1974) . In early spring I remove any empty grotty black and distorted combs from my hives and I put them in bait hives (I use spare equipment )...

Median wasp side view