Land of Milk & Honey

Weather score today:
Ice Cream Cafes 1: Nature 2

Another load of sugar solution for the girls to get processed & hopefully stored for the winter. I haven't yet told them that when they have got this latest batch made and the moisture content reduced in the hive, I will be hitting them with a pretty brutal series of formic acid gasing.

Treating the girls and so fight the war with the varroa mite is, without doubt, the most hated regular job for beekeepers. So much hated that some don't do it and for most hives that means death, sooner or later. Formic & Lactic acid are the two types of treatment many beekeepers use here rather than the synthetic chemicals propagated by industry which have largely been rendered useless by the mites building resistance and the known and unknown effects of the chemicals getting into the wax & honey. Even using the natural methods where there is no known effect on honey, beekeepers avoid doing the treatments during the honey harvesting season.

There are all sorts of ways of giving bees sugar, I have often used the paste/fondant form simply a block laid on the top of the frames and like a Mars Bar, the bees eat it, mix with water & make honey. Useful in cold conditions. Now I try whenever possible to use liquid sugar. Available in commercial pre-mixed form which the sugar companies claim is particularly refined or as I now do, mix my own, a simple 1:1 solution of white household sugar & water. I think the ladies at the supermarket checkout reckon I am a professional jam maker.

Getting the bees to safely drink the solution can be done in a number of ways but basically all with a method that allows the girls to get at the liquid without drowning - bees and liquids is a difficult subject. They invariably drown if they land on water. Hence all the greenery in the container allowing them to get to the edge in safety. This hive I have unusually used cuttings from a combination of common (herb) sage and coriander from the garden. In the other hive, I have simply used the most common method, hay. So far I haven't seen a single drowned bee.

The weather sadly also allows me more time to study the news about the USA becoming the UK's country of choice for future food supplies and, like Israel for Moses , the land the UK can flee to, to escape the suppression & tyranny they suffer under their Egyptian EU masters.

[url=https://youtu.be/vWxZWF80hs0]There are forms of Sugar & Honey from the USA that I have found quite acceptable for exactly the last 50 years. You needed to be a Bubblegum type to appreciate it. [/url]


The Archies were a "virtual band" - they didn't exist, much like any promises Trump may make the UK.