For 100% Cotton Bee Suits why not visit my shop?

Visit my shop, www.beesuitscheap.co.uk, for reasonably priced beekeeping suits!

Thursday 3 March 2011

New Beekeeping Guide for Beginners

 If you are a newcomer to beekeeping, this downloadable book may be of interest.  Of course, you will also gain knowledge from joining your local beekeeping organisation.




Beekeeping 101 discusses the best time to set your hives, when to harvest the honey, various methods used to harvest honey, and how to prepare your bees for the cold winter months....and that is just a short list of what this eBook contains! Are you worried the information covered may not apply to your area? Don't be! There are separate downloads for the USA as well as a European / Uk version to make sure you are getting the most current information for your area.

Pictures throughout the entire eBook illustrate ideas that make it even easier to understand! The anatomy of a bee and hive construction will no longer be a mystery with the included diagrams. It also includes the most common bee diseases and how to recognize and treat them. As a bonus you will also receive a truly fascinating crash course in hive behavior!

  •  Everything A Beginner Beekeeper Needs To Start Producing Honey!
  • The Best Hive Location
  • Different Bee Species
  • Hive Behavior
  •  Beekeeping Equipment
  • And Much Much More! How to Inspect the Hive
  • Spot Parasites and Diseases
  • Seasonal Management
  • Swarm Capturing
  • How to Install a Colony

Thursday 2 December 2010

New Addition to my Shop! - Beekeeping Veil



If you are a beekeeping teacher who needs better visibility from your bee veil, you might be interested in the veils I now have in my online shop. The glazed panel in the veil will allow you to see and communicate with your students much more clearly!

Thursday 18 November 2010

Those Clever Bees!

Experienced beekeepers will know just how clever those busy bees really are! 

We are dependent on them for pollinating our crops and underpinning our
agricultural systems.  And as a by product of that, they provide us with
honey to spread on our toast!

And whilst the benefits of honey are well known, enabling us to boost our
immune system and fight off colds and sore throats, the honey bee is now
being trained to detect both illness and threats to our national security.

A whole new field of medicine, apitherapy, is being developed, to use the
properties of bee venom to help sufferers of multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid
arthritis and other autoimmune diseases.  The venom has anti-inflammatory
properties which help improve the nerve transmission in of these patients.

And scientists have been taking advantage of the honeybee's exceptional ability
to determine scents.  Repeating the experiments of Ivan Pavlov and his work
on conditioned reflex, they have taught bees to respond to over 60 different 
smells.  They mix chemicals with a sugar liquid and feed this to the bees. 

This is done 5 times a day, and the bees begin to associate the smell with
the food.  When it smells the scent again, the bee extends its tongue to lap
up the nectar - and the scientists are able to measure this reflex.
The implications of this training for human health is huge - and honey bees
are already being used as early detectors of lung and skin cancers, and
silent diseases such as diabetes.  Even pregnancies can be confirmed by the
bees!  Patients breathe into diagnostic tools and the bees that have been
trained to detect any of these diseases will move nearer to the tube that
contain the breath of the sick patient.

In effect the bees are now challenging the position of sniffer dogs, and the
security industry is now extremely interested in using bees to detect
explosives or drugs.  With approximately 100 million landmines in existence
in 70 countries around the world, think what brilliant results the tiny honey
bee could achieve!

Whilst our canine agents are around 70% accurate and need investment and a
training time of up to 3 months, apparently bees have an accuracy of 98% and
need only 10 minutes training to determine a particular scent.

With the current threat to both cargo and passenger flights, a British
Company, Inscentinel Ltd, has devised a sniffer box to identify fertiliser
bombs, and  plastic explosives .  Just three trained bees are placed inside
the box, the size of a shoe box, and air is sucked in via tubes.  If the bees
detect the scent of any of these chemicals, they stick out their tongues,
sending an immediate Red Alert message to the handler.

Perhaps these tinyinsects will save us a huge amount of money (and our dignity) by avoiding the installation of full body scanners at our airports.  Currently Inscentinel are looking for partners with whom to deploy their technology.

So, take care of your bees, and who know, they may take even better care of
us!

Friday 8 October 2010

Useful Beekeeping Forum

In a bid to learn more about the field I am selling in, I have been scouring the web, and came across a useful US beekeeping forum:

www.beesource.com

The heading of this posting links to the site.  Happy reading!

Saturday 2 October 2010

Beekeeping Courses

Beekeeping courses, full day courses, evening courses and even weekend courses are taking place all over the country.

To view details just click the headline of this post, and you will see what is available in your area.

Monday 6 September 2010

New Disease Resistant Bees

Beekeeper Ron Hoskins has bred the Swindon Honeybee, which is resistant to the varroa mite.

He spotted some of his bees were combing each other to remove the mites, and he has now bred these bees with their own built in resistance to the mite.  Click the heading above to read the full story.

Sunday 15 August 2010

Podcast on Colony Collapse Disorder

I have found an interesting podcast on Colony Collapse Disorder, recorded by an expert at the University of Pennsylvania. Just click on the link below to listen to it:

www.tbeaneypublishing.com/ColonyCollapseDisorder.mp3