birdsbeekeepers and bees
Jun. 22nd, 2009 12:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fourth_moonIve been fascinated with bees and how to keep them for a while. Now I stumbled onto a group of students who keep bees. This in itself makes them unusual because normally, the average age of a beekeeper is 64. (No, really.)
So I've learned some of the basics beyond what most people know by now: all working bees are female, the drones are mostly around during summer and kicked out in fall, honey&pollen are collected during spring and summer and sustain them in fall and winter.
Today there was a representation with some interesting stuff: old beekeepers equiment like those conic hives made from straw, wooden presses, frozen frames (those are slides put into the modern hive boxes) with drones, centrifuges... I got to put together some of the frames whichi s a good thing because that's a recurring work in the student group, too.
There was a quite interesting lecture on beekeeping from an ethologist who was very, very self-assured - she told a group consisting mostly of male bee-keepers of 60 or older about ten times that most winter deaths of bee colonies aren't due to cell phone radiation, gen crops, climate change or tchernobyl but to mistakes on the side of the bee-keeper, _and_ that old bee-keepers tend to stick with the methods they learned 30 years ago no matter how many colonies they may loose each year.
But she was interesting, too, especially since she has found a way to handle her colonies (she has twenty herself, and that's just "hobby") without protective gear, even when harvesting off the honey.
If I ever have a home with a garden I think it's just a question of time till I start keeping bees. Hopefully before I'm 64.
All in all: intere
So I've learned some of the basics beyond what most people know by now: all working bees are female, the drones are mostly around during summer and kicked out in fall, honey&pollen are collected during spring and summer and sustain them in fall and winter.
Today there was a representation with some interesting stuff: old beekeepers equiment like those conic hives made from straw, wooden presses, frozen frames (those are slides put into the modern hive boxes) with drones, centrifuges... I got to put together some of the frames whichi s a good thing because that's a recurring work in the student group, too.
There was a quite interesting lecture on beekeeping from an ethologist who was very, very self-assured - she told a group consisting mostly of male bee-keepers of 60 or older about ten times that most winter deaths of bee colonies aren't due to cell phone radiation, gen crops, climate change or tchernobyl but to mistakes on the side of the bee-keeper, _and_ that old bee-keepers tend to stick with the methods they learned 30 years ago no matter how many colonies they may loose each year.
But she was interesting, too, especially since she has found a way to handle her colonies (she has twenty herself, and that's just "hobby") without protective gear, even when harvesting off the honey.
If I ever have a home with a garden I think it's just a question of time till I start keeping bees. Hopefully before I'm 64.
All in all: intere
