Better Bees
Mike Palmer's Cell Builders Humans (and walruses) are part of the natural world. We are animals. Sometimes we like to set ourselves aside from nature as if we are not part of it, but this is wrong. However, there is…
Tag: Richard Noel
Dreaming of 2020
Mike Palmer moving a barrel of honey I often like to have some theme for my blog posts, but today I'm just writing whatever pops into my head. There are lots of things to say about bees, but after a…
Hive Ventilation
Air Conditioning There are many things in beekeeping which cause furious debate. One part of this, which this demonstrated below, is that different beekeepers deal with different environmental conditions. Here are some extracts from Interviews with Beekeepers on the subject…
Keeping High Standards
The Walrus makes great honey! It's that time of the year when it's time for me to start to get my hives ready for the winter. I'm currently treating all of them with Apivar, which means that the evil varroa…
Pragmatism or Xenophobia?
Frame of Sealed Brood Beekeeping is Local Maybe I am naive or just positive and optimistic, but I'm sure that to many people I have some dangerously liberal ideas. For a start, I deliberately travelled all over the place to…
Mind The Gap
Green Fields https://flic.kr/p/8RnP8z So Long, Spring Spring is over. I'm not going by the calendar but by what I see at my beehives, although as it happens, the two are in synch. We are now in what they call the…
Bee Farmers: What do you fear?
Extracts from my interviews with bee farmers about the main threats to their livelihood
Birthday Review of the Year
As I slump in my incredibly comfortable La Z Boy chair in front of my super amazing iMac computer, I can still feel the bulk of my birthday meal progressing steadily through my walrus body. That meal was yesterday, and…
Are Your Queens Majestic?
Anybody who has been reading my blog for a while will no doubt form the view that I am obsessed with queens. I'm talking about queen honey bees, not what you were thinking, you smutty vermin. The queen bee is…
Velutina has a touch of Latina
Main image Penelope Cruz, (c) Getty from here On my recent trip to Brittany, I saw my first Asian Hornets (Vespa Velutina). They were queens trying to establish nests early in the season, and even though I'd only seen photographs…
Vive Le Morse!
Oh, the power of Google (other search engines are available, and some of them don't track your every move and send adverts to you). I just used it to find out what the French word is for "walrus" and apparently…