Yellow Challenge.

Today’s WideAngleWednesday challenge is yellow, so I chose this member of the Asteraceae family; I just wish they’d left it as Compositae, at least I can spell that. I was too gormless to either to get the tripod out or to get in close enough so it’s a bit of a jumble. The lupin leaves are unrelated.

I had some business with my beekeeping tyro from a few years ago; he’s talking about taking early semi-retirement and becoming a professional beekeeper, though I fear he’s still too much of a tyro to make a success of it. He is planning to concentrate on bee breeding rather than honey production – which is sensible. I keep bees because I like them whereas extracting honey for sale is sweated labour, and you end up with sticky floors throughout the house; then there’s the nausea of trying to find a market for the stuff. Not only that, but a colony of bees will fetch £200, plus the cost of the hardware that goes with it, and you should be able to get two daughter colonies out of each mother - £400 is the selling price for 80 pounds weight of honey.

He was also saying that he would leave the annual honey crop on his bees for over-wintering rather than buying sugar to feed them; it’s a good theory but, surprisingly, bees do better on white granulated sugar. Some honeys cause particular problems. If you’re seriously breeding bees, then you need to take them to oil seed rape as the bees build up far more quickly on that crop than on any other. If that is providing the bees winter feed then you have problems, it sets like concrete in its natural state so the bees have difficulty using it; they actually manage better on blocks of sugar candy, or even sugar in in its original paper bags – both ploys used by beekeepers. Other honeys also cause problems over winter; heather honey, the most highly valued crop, has a high protein content that causes dysentery, one thing that you don’t want if you’re stuck in a hive for four months of the year. Natural is a good concept in the right place, but if we were to take that too rigorously, we would still be keeping bees in hollow tree trunks.
 
Perhaps I should have Blipped a field of rape instead.
 
Thanks to BobsBlips for hosting today’s challenge.