December Cleansing

Very little to report on the beekeeping front, as you'd expect at this time of year so this going to be a mercifully short entry. Over in Hull we've had freezing nights, freezing days and frozen ponds. Today it was still a little on the cool side at not much over 6 degrees but the bees were flying. Cleansing flights and disposing of the dead was the order of the day.

Crap photo.

In the above pic the bees on the ground are dead ones that've been ejected from the hive and the yellow stuff on the green painted wood is ..well it's actually bee poo. Bees hold it in till it's warm enough to go out and do their business outside -well bearing in mind the hive is their bedroom/kitchen/day room it's not too surprising.

Looking a little further afield than the back garden it's been recently discovered that honey bees have a bite and use it to inject an anaesthetic to paralyse their victims. Whilst it won't disable a large foe like say the agrochemical industry it's enough to paralyse a waxmoth larvae for about nine minutes giving the bees time to haul it out of the hive. The paralysing chemical is 2-heptanone and Vita who I gather sponsored the research are looking to develop it as a local anaesthetic.

In other news my name was in this month's the BBKA News, well my name and a thousand other people who also passed the BBKA Basic Assessment. I was the only one from Hull though.