Tried lots of things to get that perfect cool smoke - going to try puff balls next year - see article
What shall I put in my smoker?
The Puffball (taken from Curiosities of Beekeeping by L.R.Croft)
The Rev. W.C.Cotton (born1814) founded while a student at Oxford, the “Oxford Apiarian Society.” This was an attempt to save the lives of bees that might otherwise have been killed by sulphuring. To achieve this end, Cotton advocated the use of the puffball fungus to stupefy the bees when taking the honey harvest. He wrote:-
The fungus does them no harm: It makes them drunk, which is good for the bees, though bad for men, as they get well in 20 minutes and are all the merrier afterwards.
The BBJ of November 1942 informs us that the use of the puffball (Galvatia gigantia) was still in use in West Sussex and that beekeepers in the Godalming district occasionally employ smouldering Polyporus betulinus and Doedolea quercina to anaesthetize bee colonies. The same journal informed its readers in July 1949 that beekeepers on the Yorkshire moors still use the puffball, however many of them are very secretive about it. In more recent times a firm in Timaru, New Zealand , is reported to use the puffball to anaesthetize bees during queen rearing.
In a study of anaesthesia of honeybees by smoke from puffballs, W.F.Woods reporting in J.Api. Res., (1983) found that the smoke from burning human hair had a similar effect to that produced by the puffball. This he attributed to the presence of hydrogen sulphide in the smoke.
The Rev. John Thorley 1671-1759 (extract from Great Masters of Beekeeping by Ron Brown)
…..”His secret was the use of smoke from a dried fungus, used as a narcotic to calm, and even anaesthetize a hive of bees. Variously called ‘frog cheese’, ‘pug foist,’ ‘puck,’ or just ‘giant fungus’ (today more commonly called ‘puff-ball), he describes how he obtained them (as large as a man’s head sometimes) from shepherds and farm workers. When fresh they could be sliced and cooked something like mushooms but on drying in summer or in a slow oven the fungus went brown and finally consisted of a fine powder in a tough outer skin. He describes taking a piece the size of a hen’s egg on a stick and holding it smouldering slowly under a skep of bees so that the smoke and fumes went up into the colony (no purpose made smoker in those days). In a minute the bees would drop off the comb like hail, into an empty skep, and wake up apparently none the worse an hour or two later. He used this technique to harvest honeycombs from skeps and box hives (instead of killing the bees with sulphur), and to unite two or three stocks with no fighting. He would also examine the bees, identify the queen (usually the last to fall down), even count and weigh them to arrive at the number in a swarm or weighing one pound. An illustration in his book shows him seated at the study table making a detailed examination of a number of anaesthetized bees. (Some years ago I found two or three of these fungi, the size of a mans head, dried them all summer in the greenhouse and successfully used a small piece of the brown matter wrapped in hessian in my smoker, to control the occasional colony of very aggressive bees. I have hesitated to speak much about this, for fear that young people might wish to experiment with it, as a narcotic drug, on themselves).”
Editor’s comment. I have asked a learned mycologist about the dangers regarding puffballs and I was looked at in amazement. It is not likely to be effective on humans—we don’t really know how or why it works on bees but if Ron Brown says it works on very aggressive bees it might be worth drying some to have in an emergency, just in case one should come across a nasty colony on a bad day.
