Our neighbour has acquired a hive of bees. It's sunny and quite dry. I've "activated" (as in "soaked") a block of coconut fibres in a plastic bucket a few days ago, to mix with soil for potting plants.

These three things, together, have resulted in this:

These are bees, probably mostly from the neighbour's hive, having a drink. Actually not only having a drink, but filling up with water to carry back to the hive, to liquify food, be able to digest pollen, and to cool down the hive if necessary.

Which means I've been watering the bee-bar every morning now - and I have the pleasure of lots and lots of bees keeping me company when I sit right outside the wintergarden, where the bucket stands, having a break!

It's time again to clear out some of the tabs that have accumulated. (Especially since I am trying to clear them all, eventually, as I'm going to switch over to another browser. Firefox is just not what it used to be; I've had nasty issues with typing lags and other long load-times and lags, and it's getting on my nerves. So currently being tested: Opera. Any browser advice is taken gladly.)

There's been a new study on alcohol consumption, and it looks like there are no health benefits that outweigh the potential downsides after all. I really liked the note of caution at the end of the text, though - where a Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk (I wasn't aware this subject even existed!) very rightly states that there is also no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention. After all, getting a fix in some way or other is a very human (and a very ancient) thing...

Speaking of ancient, if you like bananas, you might be interested in this history of the domesticated banana on Sapiens.

Let's stay with the topic of domestication - honey bees are endangered, among other things, by the varroa mite. Torben Schiffer wrote an interesting article (German and English) about this problem, stating that quite a bit of it is home-made and due to the methods of modern bee-keeping.

An article at Quartz makes a case for puns as the most elevated display of wit. Much to my delight, as I'm a total sucker for puns - the more groan-worthy, the better.

And to round things off, something from Australia in an article in German: Researchers have found out that cotton can be recycled (or upcycled) into a replacement for human cartilage.

 

Today's morning was spent outside, catching guys. One of them ended up in my pocket for a while, and then got a number glued to his back.

Have I confused you yet?

I was off to the next practical lesson in how to keep bees - and today's programme for our group was to check two hives for queen brood cells (to see if there's danger of swarming) and to catch a drone or two, to learn how to grab and mark a bee (so you can handle the queen, if necessary, without damage to her).

The not-so-willing subjects for this were drones, because a) they have no stinger, and b) the hive can stand to lose a few of the drones, who are not doing any of the hive work (except helping to keep it warm). So each of us in the group got to catch a drone bee and put it into a little cage to keep it safe for a while. (The cage then went into a pocket to keep the little bee warm.) After we'd finished checking the hives, we went off to practice marking queens - on the drones.

When you have a hive queen, it gets a little sticker on the back of the thorax. The sticker colour marks the year the queen is from, so you can tell how old the Grande Dame of the bee-hive is (which is rather important, since they live only for so long). There's special tools for holding the bee while you put a little bit of (special) glue on the thorax and then gently push the sticker onto the glue, which makes it much easier to do this (I'd have imagined it to be more difficult). Obviously you don't want to damage a young queen when marking it, so it makes sense to practice with drones beforehand, just like with the gripping.

To my inordinate joy, when my turn came up to stick a little green plaque onto the back of my little furry drone, one very special number was still available:


Meet Mr. The Answer, with his shiny new plaque stuck smack dab to the middle of his thorax. (And yes, I'm easily amused.)

 

About a year ago, I sort of decided that keeping bees would be a nice thing to do, as there are too few bees around hereabouts, and it can never hurt to have some more. Bees are wonderful, astounding and fascinating creatures - they not only produce honey (which I don't eat so much of, but I still like it quite a bit), wax (one of the main reasons why they were cultivated in the Middle Ages - there's much less wax to be harvested from a hive than honey) and propolis (I always have a bottle of propolis dissolved in alcohol in my travelling kit), they are also the reason why we get to eat fruits and vegetables. Many, many edible things would not be there if it weren't for the bees...

However, before taking the lives and well-being of several thousand creatures (like 30-50.000) into my hands, I'd like to have some proper grounding in knowledge and experience. So I spent this Saturday learning about the many things that can befall bees and make them suffer, or even die.

One of the things every beekeeper these days has to cope with, and be on the lookout for, is the varroa mite. That is a parasite originally living off Asian honey bees, but it has spread to almost everywhere worldwide these days. The other bees, though, have never developed coping mechanisms for this parasite - so without treatment, the mites will suck on the bee brood and the adults, shortening their lifespan by about one third. Which means that without treatment, the winter worker bees will not survive until April, and die about at the end of January or in February instead. With a lot of the workers dead, the hive cannot generate enough warmth anymore, and there are not enough bees to get the colony going again in spring - so the whole hive will die off.

Another thing, that I will hopefully never have to see myself when keeping bees, is American Foulbrood. This is a bacterial infection that targets the bee brood, and the younger brood is very vulnerable to the bacteria - as little as a single one is enough to infect a one-day old larva. The honey from a hive with this disease is still safe for human consumption, and in some countries it is acceptable practice to keep the symptoms down with antibiotic treatment. However, this means that the honey you buy might contain spores of the bacterium - completely safe to consume for you, but dangerous to bees. If bees eat that honey, they carry the bacteria back to their hive, and there the nasty little buggers can wreak havoc. A hive that is infested with AFB has to be killed off, and the hive box and equipment has to be either burned to destroy it or disinfected completely. If you have AFB in Germany, you have to inform the authorities, there will be an off-limits area established around the stricken hive, and all hives inside the area will have to be tested for AFB as well. This disease? It's really, really nasty. And it can be spread by honey that is perfectly fine and healthy for humans to eat.

Which means... please don't spill honey outside, or leave honey for insects to find and eat. Make sure any honey containers are rinsed, or closed properly (or both) before tossing them. Your honey spills could kill off a bee hive - or even several.