Hello dear beekeepers! I’ve been reworking my old website. not my blogs. The English part became ready enough to be published and I launched it on http://elgon.es There are quite some new material there. In the article “Resistance breeding” some of
Bees grooming, shaking and biting mite
Already in 2002 Sven-Olof Ohlsson in Munsala Finland filmed bees grooming, shaking and biting mites. I have published two of his video clips on YouTube for him. You can see one here where the the mite had attached fast between
Reinvasion is worst
Last year 2015 was a bad year for the bees in more than one respect. Long cold spring and bad summer. But late summer was good as was the autumn. The bees could recover and prepare for next year. Fresh
Breakthrough?
Last year I saw more wingless bees than I had expected and I used more thymol than I had expected. I realized that I could partially thank the bad weather fort thias. The bees had got too little of pollen.
Wingless bees and varroa level
Before varroan came there could be seen occasional bees with undeveloped/deformed wings in spring. Maybe it was the influence of DWV, Deformed Wing Virus. But it may also have been chilled brood. During the final phase of the pupa development
Learning and teaching
Hans-Otto Johnsen was very skilled already in his youth keeping old American cars and trucks going. That skill can be very handy for a commercial beekeeper. For many years he worked as an expert on explosives, but he got
Feedback on Elgon queens
Karin is a new beekeeper. She got thrilled when I took the feral swarm from the wall in one of her houses, so she wanted to keep bees. And got a daughter queen from the feral swarm. She is very
The bee shaker and varroa resistance
One mite from 300 bees. I understand that sometimes it’s a good idea to get an idea of the infestation level of varroa mites in bee colonies. You can take samples from a couple of colonies in an apiary to
Aiming for a new season
In the beginning of March the bees had their main cleansing flight after winter. In the beginning of April most of them had more combs and boxes given. At the end of April another round checking food, need for thymol,
Comment to evaluation
I want to clarify somewhat the comment in the text about the contradiction concerning the reason for lowering the threshold for giving Thymol to get a better selection. At the same time saying that if you have non-selected bees against