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I do care about stock improvement as evidenced by my first post to this thread in which I bemoaned the fact that our winters no longer seem to provide any meaningful selection pressure for colonies. This has been my personal experience, even when I have deliberately fed my colonies considerably...

In a typical wild colony where comb construction never exceeds demand, the amount of empty comb is indirectly proportional to the food security of the colony. Empty comb encourages foraging activity [1]. As the amount of empty comb increases within the limits that might be encountered in a large...

Unfortunately it looks like I am on track for my 3rd successive year of 0% winter losses, although I culled one colony myself last spring which had CBPV that got visibly worse week by week. However, I suspect that this month will be quite decisive if the brood area grows at a rate that cannot be...

Not true. Pollen imports have been implicated in the spread of bee diseases (including between continents), typically as a result of hive debris (eg chalk brood mummies and bits of bee) falling through the mesh and into the collecting tray of the pollen trap. Some traps are designed better than...

His writing style was certainly ribald. In just about every chapter of "Background to Bee Breeding" he flirted with (and typically overstepped) the boundaries of propiety in quite a deliberate manner. Furthermore, he didn't let a potentially punchy message get in the way of a good bit of...

Bees will be bees (which I am very pleased about)! I am also pleased to see that AMM colonies (the rightful allopatric subspecies near the Institut für Landwirtschaftliche Zoologie und Bienenkunde in a man-made sympatric confusion that covers the whole continent, made even more messy by the...

With regard to drifting in the apiary, I came across this paper last week, which might be worth reflecting on: Wax combs mediate nestmate recognition by guard honeybees Animal Behviour 2006;71(4): 773-779 (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347206000054) ABSTRACT Research has...

I can only assume that a cast swarm so big that it fills 2 Langstroth boxes must have come from a parent colony that was housed in 3 or 4 Langstroth boxes. How can that possibly be, especially with such a short forage season in Finland? The only thing I can think of is as follows: Somewhere...

Dear B+, Thank you very much for taking the time to reply so clearly, and thank you for doing so with such courtesy to what, from your perspective, might have looked like a highly inflammatory post from me. I understand that the description I provided of bee breeding is quite a faithful...

Please correct me if I am wrong but it seems to me that this conversation is fundamentally at cross-purposes: B+ is talking about bee breeding. I understand this to involve various specialist instrumental insemination techniques using carefully chosen queens and carefully chosen drones, one...

Applying an idea from Chapter 4 of John Atkinson's "Background to bee breeding" TWO POTENTIAL STUDIES STUDY ONE: "How many CSD genes do we estimate to be contained within the honey bee super-super-population that inhabits the land mass of mainland England, Wales and Scotland?" This would...

This is my understanding of worker policing... Egg-laying workers and worker policing in a queen-right colony All worker bees have rudimentary ovaries whose fuller development is inhibited by the presence of queen pheromone and brood pheromones within the nest [1]. Nonetheless, a dissection...

Thanks for all your replies. I think I will be trying out a few variations on a theme. “Mating in Miniature” was a preliminary outline that suggested how micronucs could be used by the Bee Improvement and Bee Breeding Association (BIBBA) in an Apis Mellifera mellifera mating programme that...

I am sorry to hear of your family loss. You could do one or more of the following traditional methods to inform the bees: 1. Using the key to your father-in-law’s house, knock gently on the hive to get the attention of the bees and then inform them in a low voice that he has died. 2. If his...

Dear folks, I recently enjoyed reading Mating in Miniature by Bernhard Mobus. It is packed full of observations and ideas that I had not considered/encountered before. However, two things particularly intrigued me as I continue my quest for the simplest possible design for a mating nuc made out...

Yes. PM me and I will send. It is worth looking him up on Google scholar. He is responsible for a lot of interesting papers, all of which are worth a read if you can track them down... mostly straightforward observational studies plus or minus simple interventions, just as relevant today as when...

The relevant paper is: Jeffree, EP. Winter brood and pollen in honeybee colonies. Insectes Sociaux. 1956;3: 417-422. Attached is a screen shot of the key results and it begs an obvious question that simply did not exist for UK beekeepers in 1956.... when is the best month to treat with...

I am pleased for you that you can put it behind you now. All the very best for the future.

Thanks Goran. Much appreciated. I will look at all the varieties, mull them over and then come up with my own unique design.... I am a beekeper after all and it is only right that we each have different answers to common situations!! Sent from my LG-H340n using Tapatalk

Brilliant. Thanks very much for going to such lengths drex. I can feel another project coming on... Sent from my LG-H340n using Tapatalk