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Rosti

If Prescott can get one for himself and the lovely Pauline, then Finmans a dead cert, the answer is yes Finman, Britain still obviously sells peerages.
 
unfortunately Bros, the one big argument against your theories about hands off beekeeping and natural cell sizes etc etc, is why have feral colonies struggled as much with varroa?
 
Back on topic....

The problem with these schemes is that as they are such an extortionate price, they will damage the credibility of any sane scheme the people might want to set up. I've thought about forward selling the produce of my hives. When I have a bit more experience, I'll be able to publish the yield statistics and let people literally "adopt a hive". Say my average yield is 90 lbs a hive (no idea, just guessing) then selling rights to that hive in advance could be worth £400. If I have an epic year, then they get cheap honey. If the year is rubbish, then they get expensive honey. As the purchaser would be linked to a hive, they could come and have a look at it - only one or two beesuits required. It would be pretty easy to blog the hive inspections, so they could keep track. If they want to come and help extract....no problem at all!
 
It's a good and valid point about feral stocks - I honestly don't know - could be pesticides weakening them, could be unregressed "fat" bee escapees from "conventional hives", I even heard it suggested that there are too few hollow trees of sufficient size - could be loads of things, but no reason to completely dismiss the "alternatives" before they've had a chance to prove themselves.
Beekeeping is essentially "unnatural" anyway, so whatever we do is departing from nature.
My experience with chickens is that if you find the right balance of the correct housing, sufficient space, good food, clean water, and essentially giving them as natural a life as possible pays dividends in health, sufficiently that you can run poultry totally organically and have virtually no health problems (healthy immune systems means they throw most things off.........) - as to how much you can extrapolate that theory to beekeeping, I don't know, but I reckon it's a pretty reasonable hypothesis to work on.......
 
Perhaps we should go back to the old skeps,let them swarm,keep the small one's for the following season, and any full of honey,shove the lot through a big mangle and wring them out.
 
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d

hate to blow our new found spirit of agreement Bros but at the moment it does sound a lot like trying to fit a theory around a conclusion you want to be true at the expense of paying any attention to the obvious.

It is starting to smack a little of the same school of thought that the Young Earth creationists employ. They know the Earth is only 6,000 years old so any evidence to the contrary just needs to be handwaved away rather than examined objectively.
 
how's your skep weaving skills?:D
As for swarming - why not? - it is after all how bees increase - perfectly normal and natural, surely the attitude should be "whoopee, new queen", and a chance of doubling your colonies if you catch the swarm. Saves all that nonsense of requeening from parts foreign, and means you don't need to keep disturbing the Nestduftwärmebindung! - simples!:coolgleamA:
 
I agree Bros.....could make some kind of simple waterproofed cardboard skeps,which would be organic and biodegradable,and instead of using sulphur pits to kill the bee's we could just gas them with co 2, dead in no time,then feed the whole thing into the mangle,kind of disposable cassette beekeeping.
 
I haven't reached any firm conclusions, I've said "I don't know" about many things, I can certainly see the holes in "bad science" - my experience in other related fields tends to suggest to me that "as near natural as possible is best" - and as is evident, there's an awful lot of effort being expended on "chemical" cures (or denying chemicals could be part or wholly causing the problems), so it's reasonable to explore every other avenue.....
To which end I've got some TBHs, a Warre, and may even get round to trying a "SuperOscar" hive next year..........
 
Funnily enough I was chatting to a teacher of (conventional) beekeeping a while ago who told me that you don't actually have to destroy the colony to harvest the honey -something about clouting the skep in the right way !(seriously!)

May be ahead of you on this - taken about 3 weeks ago in the back garden
skepfull.jpg
 
And what happens to the bee's then.......just been shaken out of the cardboard skeps after the heather honey.......and then....let them starve to death naturally.
 
It's a thumping great hive as propounded by Oscar Perone of Argentina - he's got a large and comprehensive site on the subject - http://www.oscarperone.com.ar/ - if you speak the language, a doddle, if you don't there's a browser-crashing Google translation into pidgin English........

It has been discussed and chunks mistranslated at great length on another forum, but he believes that we force bees into hives that are too small, and we need to give them more space to achieve what he considers a "critical mass" (huge) - with a very big brood area, and inviolable honey stores (they are foundationless), and essentially run on a completely hands off regime - just harvest honey once a year- he gets enormous yields from them,and uses a very crude "crush and strain" technique for the honey......
Several people are thinking of seeing if they'll work over here too........:coolgleamA:
 
Brosville said:
I haven't reached any firm conclusions, I've said "I don't know" about many things, I can certainly see the holes in "bad science" - my experience in other related fields tends to suggest to me that "as near natural as possible is best" - and as is evident, there's an awful lot of effort being expended on "chemical" cures (or denying chemicals could be part or wholly causing the problems), so it's reasonable to explore every other avenue.....
To which end I've got some TBHs, a Warre, and may even get round to trying a "SuperOscar" hive next year..........
Click to expand...

There's also an awful lot of effort looking into all aspects of beekeeping and bees and whether chemicals are all or part of the problem, I know it's trendy to sweep that aspect under the carpet because it makes it harder to paint conventional science or even your favourite beekeeping organisation in a bad light but it's going on none the less whether in an organised manner or at a grass roots level.

Personally I don't really give a damn what box you put bees in, what I am interested in is how people are keeping bees especially when they're claiming that doing x,y,z (or not as the case may be) is resulting in far less problems. Where I tend to lose respect is when it becomes clear that a lot of the claims either don't stand up to long term examination or are simply a declaration of faith to begin with.
 
Hivemaker. said:
Perhaps we should go back to the old skeps,let them swarm,keep the small one's for the following season, and any full of honey,shove the lot through a big mangle and wring them out.
Click to expand...

Ah.. not quite so simple.... Big skeps or little skeps?

And .. to start a real bun-fight you could get into the benefits of ekes, nadirs and bell-jars when faffing about with skeps.

The environmentally friendy types could always get some "Driving irons" and drive the bees between skeps or, use puffball fungus in thier smokers (or for those more into chemical farming a whiff of ether) to help narcotise the bees before shovel them into the next bio-degradable skep.

Seriously, swarm-watching could become a career; let's get the unemployed out in the sun with binoculars... They could run behind the swarms, jumping ditches and fighting their way through thorny hedges (whilst tanging merrily away) for excercise...
 
I've got no problem whatsoever with "conventional science" (bit like trying to argue with immutable laws of physics) but get hopping mad when it's misused as a tool to bamboozle a gullible public.........
 
Seriously, swarm-watching could become a career; let's get the unemployed out in the sun with binoculars... They could run behind the swarms, jumping ditches and fighting their way through thorny hedges (whilst tanging merrily away) for excercise...
Click to expand...
You could be a Labour minister, creating work for the sake of it.

I've got no problem whatsoever with "conventional science" (bit like trying to argue with immutable laws of physics) but get hopping mad when it's misused as a tool to bamboozle a gullible public.........
Click to expand...
And I get mad when it's misrepresented to push an agenda normally by people who don't like what the "science" says.
 
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Bloody big cardboard skeps,these would be graded by weight and stood in there respective lines,keepers and crushers.....then use a kind of solar powered combine,or in this case beebine,box goes in one end...bee's get CO2 and shaken,then blown out of spout as organic fertilizer....box goes through heated rollers to separate honey and wax...then carboard gets shredded and blown out over the field with the bee's..more organic fertilizer. Nice easy job sitting in deckchair watching the swarms go into the box's placed all over the area.
 
Brosville

On the Oscar Perone site, does he claim less swarming due to the hive volume or is it still the same because of more bees? If that lot swarmed you'd need a skip not a skep! Lol. Sorry to ask, browser quite rightly crashes on translate....all the best....Dtg.
 
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