Bees - native and honey

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Comment by Christa on October 24, 2018 at 17:53

Yes Lissa, he sells most of his supplies from market stall, and often runs out of stock.  Regular customers help when selling honey.

Sorry Dianne, our nephew scored the honey super but we all had a finger licking session first. Yum.   

Comment by Dianne Caswell on October 24, 2018 at 17:07

Congrads Christa, we will have to hire your Nephew to do ours. Please keep me a spoonful of Honey??????

Comment by Lissa on October 24, 2018 at 16:12

Wonderful Christa :) Can't wait until I have my own SNB hive again.

Where does your nephew sell his honey?

I do have a local guy, just off the island, who sells his home grown honey using an honesty box. I would like to think everyone pays for what they take. He's been doing it for some time so I guess the answer to that is "yes".

Comment by Christa on October 24, 2018 at 13:31

We split our native stingless bee hive today.  Our nephew visited us and we took the opportunity to use his beekeeper knowledge to help us.

The hive was full, which was a lovely surprise, the super was full of honey pots.  He has taken the spare to his place and will bring it back after a couple of months.   So soon we will have 3 more hives to keep here at home. 

He mentioned that he has an honesty box out front of his house and it has jars of raw honey which he sells and he is amazed at how many honest people there are who leave their payment in the box.

Comment by Lissa on May 5, 2018 at 5:27

You remember correctly Elaine :)

Bob Luttrell was most intrigued by the comb style the new bees built. Bob now owns the hive.

Comment by Elaine de Saxe on May 4, 2018 at 21:38

And as I recall Lissa, the variety of bee which triumphed was different to the ones they took over. A hybrid too I think.

Comment by Lissa on May 4, 2018 at 20:46

This happened with my hive some years ago - they were invaded and taken over by another hive. There's a pictorial record of it somewhere, probably in my blogs. The new bees eventually carried on in the hive as usual.

Comment by Christa on May 4, 2018 at 19:07

Elaine, We could not figure out what to do, apparently after googling the problem, we learnt that swarming native bees let off a scent which attracts local hives.  We had a cloud of bees in the air in front of the entrance. The appeared to grab on to each other and hit the ground.

We turned the hose on with a soft spray and they calmed down and some must have gone home as there were less after spraying.  There are quite a few dead ones around.

Comment by Elaine de Saxe on May 4, 2018 at 11:41

From reading posts to the Native Bee Yahoo group, stingless bees can be feisty little buggers and frequently fight other stingless bees with many deaths on both sides. I get the impression that stingless bees don't swarm in the way exotic bees do - stingless Queens cannot fly so there can't be a real swarm in the exotic bee style.

There's lots of reasons why these things happen and not all of the reasons have been found yet.

Observe them, you might see an obvious reason. Have you contacted the Zabels?

Comment by Christa on May 4, 2018 at 8:55

Native stingless bees are swarming at the entrance of our hive, is this a problem? Are there intruders of is my queen leaving the hive? 

What do you think is happening?

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