Books published by Northern Bee Books

Melinda ensures that the new queen, Gael, departs on her quest to find a cure for the Varroa mite. She meets Anthony, the ant, who, along with the rest of his nest, help her to retake the hive and spray the bees with their good formic acid. The control by the Varroa mites has been broken and Gael has earned her place as their new queen. Melinda and the other foragers meet a hoverfly who is also a nectar drinker. At first they are suspicious but when Max, the hoverfly, explains why he may look like a wasp, they are much relieved. Wiley the wasp terrorizes the foragers but gets distracted by some jam tarts set out for a picnic. The foragers make it home safely. The final episode recounts the events during the year that characterise the lives of honey bees, their life cycle, and sets the tone for conservation requirements. It is in our interest to maintain healthy colonies of honey bees for our own existence which is dependent on their taking pollen from one flower to the next. This ensures that the plants will produce the fruit and vegetables that we eat.

From the outset, Melinda, a new-born female honey bee does everything she can to please her queen, Melissa. She has many jobs to do in the hive before she can learn to fly. In her first flying lesson, she finds taking off and landing are difficult and she practises hard. Soon she joins the ranks of the foragers. Daisy, the scout bee, returns early one morning and quickly dances her waggle dance to let the other foragers know where to go for more pollen and nectar. On her way home, Melinda is distracted by some pretty flowers in a window box and she enters through the open window. She is made a prisoner behind the glass of another closed window in the same building. She has a lucky escape! One morning soon after, Melinda, her sisters, their queen and some drones wake up near the coast.They are on holiday! They have a wonderful time, buzzing here and there, but returning home one evening, they are shocked to discover their own hive has disappeared. Melinda sees another hive and they join in there for protection. They give all their honey and nectar to their new friends.

Honey bees can successfully live in all sorts of different nest sites - a holein a tree, a chimney pot or a bee-hive - but in all cases this is just a cavity inwhich to make a set of combs. It is in and on these combs that all the withinthe colony functions occur. Because it is dark in the hive, communication isthrough pheromones or vibration and combs provide the ideal carrier for thisinformation. For example, bees can always locate the queen by followingthe trail of her footprint pheromone on the combs. The main outside thehive activities are foraging, swarming and queen mating. As beekeepers,interested in the production of honey, we tend to concentrate on the foragingactivities of our bees and it is easy to overlook the fact that over 95% of atypical worker bee's life is spent within the confines of the colony engaged insome activity in or on the combs. In a sense, the combs are an extension ofthe bees that made them and it is bees and combs together that constitutethe colony.Up until about 1850, bee colonies, whether wild of under human stewardship(it hardly qualified as management), built themselves a set of combs entirelyaccording to their own design in whatever cavity they could find or wasprovided by the beekeeper. No restriction was placed on the way the colonyused these combs to engage in their main activities of brood rearing and foodstorage. With the introduction of the moveable frame hive, followed quickly bythe invention of wax foundation and the queen excluder, everything changed.Beekeepers were now able to induce the bees to make their combs wherethey (the beekeepers) wanted them, ie in wooden frames. The beekeepercould now even influence the size of cells they built by the dimensions of thehexagon embossed on the sheet of wax. It also became possible to separatethe use of combs for brood rearing and honey storage using a queen excluder.Some of the changes that modern beekeeping has imposed on colonies havepotential effects on the health and welfare of the bees and others do not.

This is the remarkable story of Mary Bumby who was the first person to take honeybees to New Zealand. When, in 1838, her brother, John, was appointed as superintendent missionary at the Mangungu Mission House in New Zealand she decided to accompany him to look after him and act as his housekeeper. Because John liked honey Mary took with her two skeps of bees on the five-month long voyage, arriving in New Zealand in March 1839.Both Mary and John were devout Wesleyan Methodists and their faith must have helped them through the many trials and tribulations they suffered during the years at the Mission House.

DIRECTORY OF BEEKEEPING ASSOCIATIONS AND ORGANISATIONSBEEKEEPING CALENDAR AND RECORDS ¿ ILLUSTRATED ARTICLES

The aim of this booklet is to help beekeepers to better understand honey itself and to harvest and prepare it for home use or sale retaining as much of its essential properties as possible. What exactly is honey, for it is certainly a lot more than a solution of various sugars in water? If we are to produce good honey it is important to understand how it should be handled in all stages between the hive and jar because in reality it is quite a delicate product. Stories about finding four thousand year old honey in Egyptian tombs and "and it was just as good as the day it was put there" are just that - stories. There are many similarities between honey and wines; they both need great care in their production, handing and storage if they are to develop and retain their full potential. It is generally accepted that the `best` honey comes straight from the comb (cut comb or sections). The various processes that we use to get pristine honey from the comb into a jar all have the potential to damage it in some way. In Britain we currently get a premium price for home-produced honey (the envy of beekeepers in many other parts of the world) and it is our responsibility to see that we bring a top quality product to market.