Articles
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My wife and I recently enjoyed our first visit to Darwin, as part of a trip on the Ghan from Darwin to Adelaide. About a month before we left, Tas Festing, a Northern Territory beekeeper, rang to renew his ABK subscription. I asked him how far Humpty Doo was from Darwin, and promptly received an invitation from Tas to visit him at Humpty Doo. Furthermore, he would also pick us up from our hotel and give us a Cooke’s tour of the Humpty Doo area. Too good an opportunity to pass up!!
True to his...
For the past fourteen months I have had a strong double-entrance beehive in a fully screened greenhouse, when conventional wisdom said it could not be done. Although success with a single hive proves nothing, it is a very encouraging start.
In the winter of 2011, my neighbour Ray Daniels of Sunray Strawberries asked me to put a hive of honeybees, Apis mellifera, in an experimental greenhouse on his strawberry farm. Ray, and the manager of a firm named Magnificent, Rudi Bartels, who specialises...
At the end of our recent cycling trip through the Balkans, Slovakia and Austria, we spent the last 5 days with our German beekeeper friends, Andreas Hahnle and Christiana Keppler, at Wallenstein. The morning after they picked us up from Frankfurt, Andreas had me out at 7.00am, helping him to catch and cage virgin queens from mating boxes in his back yard. Why catch the virgins if they were in mating boxes, you say? Because these virgins were destined to be instrumentally inseminated.
Each of...
By the time readers receive this Issue, Spring will be well underway, the brood nest will have expanded and hives should be booming. Now is the time for beekeepers to give thought to increasing their hive numbers, even if it is only from one hive to two hives.
There are some good reasons for doing this.
1. When I started beekeeping, Bruce Ward said to me, ‘It is always easier to keep two hives than one. If one queen dies, you can take eggs from the good hive, give them to the weak hive,...
By the time readers receive this Issue of The ABK, almond pollination will almost be finished.
With a Spotted Gum honey flow happening on the NSW South Coast over winter, a lot of beekeepers had to pull their bees out of the South Coast to honour their commitment to provide bees for the almonds. A few (a very few) beekeepers have commented that this shows the ‘craziness’ of going to the almonds – ‘they had to leave a good honey flow!’
It is these few beekeepers, who make that sort of comment,...
The most recent Climate Champion Program Conference was held on 21/22 March in Canberra. The main event of this Conference was at the National Press Club – a mini-conference (involving mainly the 34 Climate Champions) covering issues around managing climate and emissions on-farm, followed by a full, televised lunch and panel discussion about food security in a changing climate (with a lot of journalists and government people attending).
The mini-conference started with Peter Hayman from the SA...
As the title suggests, this is not by any stretch of the imagination meant to be a definitive account of beekeeping in Nepal. It is simply an account of some observations made on beekeeping, both managed and wild, whilst trekking in the Annapurna and Everest regions just before Christmas, 2011.
On the second day of our trekking holiday in the Annapurna region, we reached the small village of Ghandruk. The village was in the heart of the area from which came the Nepalese Ghurkha soldiers,...
I have been giving this topic a lot of press over the past few months, because I regard the use of pesticides in our environment as the single biggest threat to the survival of beekeeping – witness the recent poisonings and accidental crop spraying affecting bee numbers in the Wide Bay Burnett area in Qld. Pesticides worry me even more than the threat of Varroa. Varroa has not shut down beekeeping– it has just become more difficult.
The threat of pesticides, however, is insidious. At what...
To Australian Beekeepers from an Australian Beekeeper
INTRODUCTION
To respectfully include the outsider, I have to start with an explanation. Australian Beekeepers are very secretive; they tell you about the honey flow when it is in the drum. When called for, general information sharing is thorough, very effective and quick; there are many Australian Beekeepers that can tell you about honey flows and problems from South Australia to Queensland in overnight conversations.
They cover vast...
A specialist queen rearing course was held at Richmond, NSW on the 25th -27th March, hosted by the Wheen Foundation and conducted by the two NSW DPI, beekeeping specialists Dr Doug Somerville and Mr Nick Annand. The course was fully subscribed with 18 students who travelled from as far as Queensland, Victoria, South Australia, Northern Territory, Cocos Islands and regional NSW.
The course has been developed to provide beekeepers with the skills and knowledge to produce their own quality queen...