Teralba Park Honey

This stuff hurts.

Down in the apiary today I found 2x more dead hives, this feels like it hurts more becuase I remember them so well

I remember working them in a dress with no suit on, they were always so gentle

I remember pulling 9 frames of perfect honeycomb from Margaret! I remember transporting them so carefully as not to ruin the masterpiece

I remember using an ideal box for the first time becuase she was so good at making the most perfectly uniformed comb

And now all thats a memory.

I'm sorry we couldn't do more. We tried.

Varroa has been in Queensland for only a few months and I'm already over it and reminiscing about the past

The joy of beekeeping has been stripped away, I now open hives to find a war zone of parasites, pests and dispare! I feel very doom and gloom about it all at the moment, it almost feels like this chapter is processing the 5 stages of grief and I'm in the anger/depression phase

Since its discovery in 2022, I've been quite positive, my view was 'every other continent in the world has it, so we will find our own way to manage"

but until you're watching the bees...your bees....run in circles, trying to scrape the mite from their thorax you dont really understand the heartbreak!

I know this is just a really really sh*tty season, and I know we...and the bees...will come out the other side, i know hives will die but I also know we are throwing everything we can at them in the hopes of helping them learn to live with this new challenge

If your a beekeeper, I see you - if your not, you can help by purchasing your honey from your local beekeeper, now more than ever that purchase can be the difference between being able to afford the treatment or not

Did you know that honey bees collect water as well as nectar and pollen!

They use water to cool down the hive- can you see their little tongues working!

Have you heard of drone sacrificing as a varroa management strategy?

In queensland we are currently fighting first wave of varroa, and it is absolutely devastating!!! Hobbiest and commercial beekeepers alike literally trying anything and everything that they can to help their bees make it through this first wave, and one of those strategies is called drone sacrifice

And if it sounds harsh, its cause it is harsh - but it's an all natural method that doesn't include chemicals. The process includes promoting a section of drone comb in the brood box. Because the varroa life cycle and the drone bee life cycle time frames are very similar. The varroa eat away at the flesh of the drone bee as it's going through its stage of metamorphus cause them to hatch out deformed

BUT

If you time your inspections perfect, you can cut out and disguard your drones + the varroa before they hatch out! Pretty cool right

No treatment is perfect and no treatment is 100% fool proof, with Drone sacrificing, if you dont time your inspection perfectly then your essentially letting a varroa bomb off in your hive making things easy worse!

Combining methods is what's working best for us right now! If you're an Australian beekeeper, how are you doing right now?

When a honeybee stings you, she dies! Sad right!?!!

This little bee stung my finger when I was working the hive and maybe she wasnt a wasted sacrifice becuase she can help to educate others!!!

Now I had been in beehives for about 45 minutes, with no gloves on, before I captured this moment, meaning bees really dont want to sting you, I had accidentally bumped her during the inspection and she stung me as a warning

Her barb was stuck and she ripped out her venom sack trying to fly away, which is what happens most times when a bee stings a human

Thats because their stingers were designed to sting insects, not humans!

The famous waggle dance in action!!!

Honey bees perform this behaviour to communicate the location of food sources to the rest of the colony. The angle of the dance tells other bees which direction to fly in relation to the sun, while the length of the waggle indicates the distance to the resource.

One tiny insect… running an entire navigation system inside the hive.

The feedback is my Spot The Queen reels are too easy so enjoy this ultra hard version from today's supersedure inspection!

Let me know how hard it was to find her!