Making a difference?

[drumgerry]

Yep I've seen some horrific videos of honey and brood all getting sliced off together. Probably better for you like that!

[Emma]

The product I THINK you get is made from beet sugar grown in northern Europe. Organic versions also available.

I have had a UK produced invert syrup and would not buy it again. Was cheaper but had real quality issues rendering it barely suitable for bees.

Strangely I am told that one of the brands of invert sold in France actually is made in the UK, but not sold here, unless you buy it from the French company it is made for. Both it and the UK syrup I trialled a few years back were starch derived, whereas the market leading bee feeds are relatively natural in their origin, being produced using locally produced beet sugar and are enzymatically inverted. Negative marketing by at least one vendor states other brands to be acid inverted and bee toxic, but this is just a fabrication to scare people into only buying their brand.


Ditto previous post, in this case to Emma.

Hmm, lots of factors to think about - very interesting, thanks! Sounds like I could almost certainly find lower impact syrup, then. Good: it's on my wishlist... tho' in practise I may carry on going for the cheapest price, provided the quality is good. My beekeeping costs enough as it is - mostly in time, but as a freelancer that translates very directly into lost money.

Just now I'm figuring out how to insulate my hives. See if I can just cut down their winter fuel bills, in future

[Emma]

Also...and there is various research to both support and deny this.......but from our experience it is a very clearly proven case......the bees winter far better on well ripened syrup and especially good invert syrup, than they do on heather honey. Far less dysentery. OK, so you get away with wintering on heather honey most years, but give us a long cold winter without bee flight for a couple of months or more then the proteins in the gut give big problems when bees on 'clean' stores are fine. I remember seeing a German study from Bavaria about various types of winter feeding and it showed quite clearly that natural stores were the worst. Not clear exactly what these natural stores were floral origin wise, or even if there was honeydew involved, but the top wintering product out of the full range tested was Api-Invert, one of the best of the invert syrup feeds and one that is free of maltose.

As with everything, its all about proportionality and experience. You get to know what is the right and wrong thing to do, and where I disagree with many of these more 'natural' beekeepers is anthropomorphism. They have their own belief structure and for whatever reason have decided that the way they want to live is also the way their bees want to live. Bee health statistics would say different, but they turn that into a virtue by some slight of hand, interpreting it as natures way of eliminating unsuitable stock.

Don't suppose you've got a reference for that Bavarian study? Or any more details I could track it down by? It's always good to have my core prejudices challenged I certainly could see the difference in dysentery last winter, between a couple of hives I'd taken to the heather & the rest. The heather diet didn't stop them being my strongest colonies in the spring, though - the ones that stayed put in Fife all stopped laying in August, which seems to have made much more of a difference overall. But it was hardly a long, cold winter.

My non-beekeeping activities mean I meet natural beekeepers every now and then. Met a newbie recently who I think may become a very good beekeeper. But some of the others may never notice or learn very much at all about bees. One was lovingly feeding honey to her pets. Organic honey if she could find it, but, from the sound of it, otherwise whatever she could find in the shops. She'd never heard of foulbrood, but I think she may possibly have listened when I told her about it. Others assume that brown sugar is bound to be good for bees. I always do my best to dissuade them...

Having said that, I'm convinced that me & my bees have a lot in common. I'm completely obsessed by bees, and bee behaviour... & so are they

[Emma]

Yep I've seen some horrific videos of honey and brood all getting sliced off together. Probably better for you like that!

Hmm, I don't think so. Honey is best raw, IMO, but brood is definitely better stir-fried. Wouldn't do to mix them

[Mellifera Crofter]

Hmm, I don't think so. Honey is best raw, IMO, but brood is definitely better stir-fried. Wouldn't do to mix them

I've never had stir-fried honey-bee brood, but I've had stir-fried Mopane worms. No, actually just one. I did not ask for a second one.
Kitta

[Emma]

In seriousness, my favourite way to prepare bee grubs is to leave them in a hive being cuddled by bees for 3 weeks or so, then let them emerge to live a full life. And if I thought people were going to farm bees for grubs in the UK I'd probably join Luisa on the campaign trail.
But I'm quite into the idea of insect protein more generally. Very resource efficient.
Mopane worms are big! (I had to google them, hadn't heard of them.) I've had roasted mealworms, much less daunting, & very tasty.

[Jimbo]

If you google value added products from beekeeping
This is a large document produced by the United Nations you will find a few recipes with pictures on how to prepare your bee grubs


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[Emma]

The FAO one? (http://www.fao.org/docrep/w0076E/w0076e19.htm) It's been ages since I read that. I'd forgotten how much detail there was. I think I mostly read the advice on getting pupae/larvae out of cells. During my second season I did an awful lot of drone culling - and counted an awful lot of varroa mites - but none of the "get them out of the cells easily" methods worked for me. Admittedly I was trying to remove every last one, so I could count the mites accurately - I figured if I was going to kill the brood, I should at least learn as much as possible about what was going on.
Never occurred to me to smoke them or pickle them in brandy, though...

[Mellifera Crofter]

...
Never occurred to me to smoke them or pickle them in brandy, though...

Now we know what to do with culled drone brood! That was an interesting link, Jimbo.

[John M]

Be interesting to hear what John M has to say after all the help he gave her.
Too much focus on marketing and fundraising and not enough focus on beekeeping in this enterprise.
Got to be a first - pitching it from a commercial beekeeper perspective looking for crowd funding then reinventing yourself as a 'natural' beekeeper.

I have only just become aware of this discussion and am sad that some of you feel able to criticise without any understanding of why she is choosing to do what she feels she needs to do.

First of all, her business model has worked, she successfully produced honey, increased her hive numbers and developed a market so that is not the reason for the change of direction. She has worked really hard at it and could easily continue in the way the rest of the Scottish bee farmers do if that was what she chose to do.

Over time though she has become concerned about certain aspects of the way bees are kept and has done a huge amount of research into everything. Some of what she writes is perhaps affected by the fact that English is not her native language so she has given the impression that beefarming involves removing all of the honey in the hive. This she never did and nor do any of the rest of us (to the best of my knowledge). See Calluna4U for details.

I have just taken off the last of my heather honey and find that some of the brood boxes are heavy and some are light. In my case that means they have access to a variable amount of honey but get topped up with sufficient ambrosia to achieve the weight I think they need for winter.
Luisa has physically weighed each of her hives and then used her "harvest" frames to top up the light ones. In this, the worst season for years, she has had to use only a very small amount of ambrosia. To me that is putting her money where her mouth is. Of course that means she has no income from this year's harvest and if she were to continue with that model she would expect very little even in a normal one. Of necessity therefore she will have to free up time to make a living and will not be able to look after 150 hives as well. Hence the need to reduce numbers to a level she will be able to cope with.

I may not agree with all of the conclusions she has come to about artificial feeding and the effect of foraging on OSR but I very much respect the fact that she has thought deeply about it and done a lot of research which I perhaps prefer to ignore.

All I ask is that you do not rush to judgement and give credit to someone who genuinely cares about what she is trying to do.

John