NZ Manuka Honey Company looking for Bee Keepers Urgently

[Into the lions den]

yes Goran. I too have had quite a few attacks for abusive practice of moving bees from crop to crop and not letting them have a break.

Actually I wish we had more crops to move them to.

It is NOT a bad practice, that's just people thinking like people and not reading the way the bees respond. Bees are bees and people are people.

The migrated bees that do the most work are the healthiest of all come spring, indeed all year. Bees are at their most content given work to do, and the difference in morale between colonies migrated to a crop and those in a static apiary going through periods of dearth is huge.

In our unit there is a very strong correlation between the hives who got a lot of honey in the first half of August (only available for us by migrating) and and wintering performance, and bees that got nothing in that period are normally our poorest in spring.

I do not know exactly what 'disgusted' the poster about migration, perhaps they would care to enlarge on why they thought that. It seems to be commonly held as an opinion in some circles, yet its actually good for the bees too.

 

[Griffo]

It wasn't the moving of the hives that bothered me. It was some of the images of the truck loading. I'm sure overall it didn't do the bees any harm (except for the ones they dropped as they were chucking them up onto the truck) but I have got used to handling a hive with some respect rather than treating it just as a box to be shifted.