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Showing posts from March, 2022

Translation

More Bee News - The Good, The Not so Good and the Ugly

    -Bees among the Lavender by Beverly Buckley from Pixabay  I notice that fourth Graders at an Irish Primary School (Presentation Primary) are planting a bee garden as part of the Green-Schools Ireland Programme which teaches environmental education in schools. This is a lovely idea. Lone bees and especially native bees would probably prefer a bee hotel though it doesn't have to be as fancy as the one below. See the instructions for making all kinds of different ones here. The Ritz of Bee Hotels - This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY Thinking Humanity In The USA, The Bee Conservancy has established around a dozen ‘bee villages’ in inner city community gardens. This not only helps to protect the bees- some species are now listed as endangered in the USA, and teaches people about them, but the bees help to produce virtually twice the amount of produce, thereby benefiting the community in return. The Bee Conservancy has listed a number of other ways to he

Revenge of the Bees

  Many thanks for This Photo licensed under CC BY Orangeaurochs     Both as a warning to others and because I haven’t finished World Water Day yet -it was on 22/3/2022, let me tell you about a misadventure I had with my bees. The day started beautifully. It was lovely weather so I spent almost the whole day with the bees. I got a bit of honey and started moving their supers around for winter. They were a bit upset by that so I finished up, went inside and took off my beekeeping gear. My bees are normally very quiet and I often enjoyed a coffee with them on the balcony with no protective clothing at all, while they went about their work. After a while, the neighbours noticed that the bees were a bit agitated. Looking out, I could see they were buzzing around an open ice cream container into which I had scraped some bits of wax, honey and a couple of dead bees from between the supers. Not wanting the neighbours to get worried, I thought I’d just duck outside and put a lid on the