In beekeeping, as in life, everybody makes mistakes. Even bees occasionally make them. The hard part is owning up to them. Douglas Adams said, “a common mistake that people make when trying to design something foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.” I hate the fact that I stray into the realm of … Read more
I love science. I’ve even got a chemistry degree, but don’t ask me about it because that was over thirty years ago. As soon as I left university, I went to the City to do accountancy. It’s hard to deny the importance of science in our lives. The scientific method; the testing of a hypothesis … Read more
As I was planting out some tomatoes at my Mum’s place today, I became aware of a voice emanating from my back pocket. I grabbed my phone and was horrified to discover that I had “butt called” Murray McGregor of Denrosa Apiaries. I’m crazy busy right now, what with queen rearing and making nucs and … Read more
There is not much point in looking good if you don’t feel it. Most of us want to be attractive, I think, but few people ever believe that they are. From my experience, this torment is most pronounced in the adolescent years and early adulthood. However, as a 55-year-old happily married father of three awesome … Read more
The Chosen Ones I have some great queens in my hives. My best one is a “yellow dot” in her third season. Her hive is always one of my tallest, giving me loads of honey every year. I’ve never seen any signs of swarming in her colony, and she has gone through two winters in … Read more
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 “June Gap”. The trees have finished flowering apart from lime trees (Lindens). The oilseed rape is long gone, … Read more
The honey flow seems to have slowed down for a while, and my bees are less desperate to swarm. Last week I discovered that three of my hives swarmed even though I had checked them, which goes to show how easy it is to miss the odd queen cell. The majority of my colonies used … Read more
Before I get into bee stuff, I must say something about a show on Netflix that has blown me away this season: American Idol. I think I have previously written about how it makes me cry, which is not something I’m proud of, but there it is. It makes me cry like a baby walrus … Read more