Bücher veröffentlicht von Northern Bee Books

The book describes the development, construction and operation of the "People's Hive" of Abbé Émile Warré. The original L'Apiculture Pour Tous ran to twelve editions in French. This a translation of the last edition by Patricia & David Heaf is the first such in English. Warré's hive can be easily made by anyone with basic woodworking skills or is available from suppliers in the UK, USA or continental Europe. The title will be attractive to all who wish to follow a natural way of keeping bees which the author describes. ¿¿A translation by Mr & Mrs Heaf of the 12th French edition of L'Apiculture Pour Tous which suggests simple and productive beekeeping.¿¿This translation was made from the 1948 French Edition.

Among the fly family Syrphidae are many examples of bee mimics, mostly of the genus Eristalis, among which we found the world-wide common dronefly, Eristalis tenax, most convenient for detailed study, as there is no sting. As would be expected for a fly, the eye is much larger than that of the honeybee.Our analysis revealed it as a typical fly visual system with some specialised differences related to detection of movement and foraging among flowers for nectar. Eristalis does not mimic the honeybee in any way except appearance. The life histories are totally different. Eristalis has an aquatic larva that lives in nutritious rubbish, in which it has travelled independently around the world in bilge water of ships.

Say "queen rearing" to most beekeepers, and they will probably run a mile! This book aims to de-mystify the mysteries of simple queen rearing. It sets out to explain a method of queen rearing on a small scale, which can be used by any beekeeper with a few years of experience and a small number of hives, perhaps only three or four (or even two).Bruce Henderson Smith lives in Cornwall and has been keeping bees simply for over 35 years. He is an Honorary Life Member of the Cornwall Beekeepers Association and a past Chairman of the CBKA Council.As a change from honey production, he started queen rearing in 2019. He is very keen on encouraging and persuading beekeepers of all standards to learn more. Hence this book to improve both local bees and the expertise of local beekeepers everywhere.

A nuc, or nucleus colony, is simply a small colony of bees that have been created by a beekeeper to use for a range of purposes. This is where the simplicity ends! To go beyond that definition, it is important to explore some of the reasons that beekeepers want to create smaller colonies - after all much of the season is spent trying to produce and maintain the largest colonies possible to maximise their nectar gathering potential and the subsequent honey crop!Beginning with the format that most beekeepers are familiar with, a nuc can be a half size colony.

Your interest in bees may be inspired by the humble honey bee and how they live together as individuals and yet act as one organism. Or you may want to help native bees thrive and multiply. Or you may want to harvest honey and beeswax for your own consumption or as part of a side hustle. Whatever the reason or reasons, this workbook is designed to help give you some basic information to help you decide how you might engage with native bees or keep honey bees.This primer is intended to introduce you to the most essential information you need to help you decide if you want to pursue the path of gardening for native bees and/or adopting your own bee hive.

The present book is an original study on beekeeping which, apart of course for the existing modern literature, is based on four pillars:1. the study of the relevant ancient Roman and Byzantine literature; 2. the study of the works by foreign travelers who visited Greece from the 17th to the 19th centuries to gather information on beekeeping and wicker hives;3. the study of archival, mainly unpublished, material; and4. the results of the author's on-the-spot investigations throughout Greece during the last seventeen years. All types of Greek woven hives are explored, as well as the methods of practicing beekeeping by these means during the last centuries. Their construction techniques and the materials used, both by the beekeepers themselves and by professional basket weavers, are also recorded. The proposed theses of the possible use of woven hives during the Bronze Age are examined, as well as all written sources concerning beekeeping with this sort of hive during Greco-Roman antiquity and the Middle Ages. The possible introduction of open-at-the-bottom wicker hives to the Greek region is also being investigated.Finally, the influence of a specific type of Greek woven hive, namely the open-at-the-top with movable combs, on the evolution of world beekeeping, both in the developed and the developing world, is examined.

Bumblebee keeping is a unique enterprise. Forget what you know of (honey) beekeeping: this is a different game, and Nelson Pomeroy lays it bare.In a candid account of his career as a student, scientist, businessman and teacher, he details most aspects of working with bumblebees: outdoor nesting sites, laboratory observation hives, crop pollination and commercial-scale rearing. His innovations range from specialist concrete to electric heating systems, mass-producible colony starting containers and bumblebee feeding systems. Bumblebee colonies are small, with a peak of up to a few hundred bees. He grapples with this from various angles-from measuring colony productivity and foraging strength to measuring pollination stocking rates.Bumblebee Keeper blends a personal narrative with practical information. It will interest readers from pollination management through bee biologists to those with an interest in agro-technologies. It concludes with a selection of bumblebee conservation issues and challenges decision-makers on the best approach to sustainability of pollination for food security.

Alan Wade is a research scientist and has kept bees for well over forty years. In Highways and Byways of Beekeeping he ventures down some of the many back roads beekeepers have taken. He explores the limits of our knowledge and understanding of honey bees while introducing us to some of the lost arts of beekeeping practice. Highways and Byways also explores the world of bees not amenable to being kept in hives.Highways focuses on the overarching life cycle of bees: the queen in the hive and the colony mission to reproductively swarm, elements of bee proclivity that the beekeeper needs to master. It then segues to hive management and hive construction practices that have enhanced their keep.Byways courses a broader view of what we know about the twelve or so species of honey bee and their many opportunistic foes. It also sketches the contributions of lesser known but exemplary beekeepers who have so fundamentally influenced the way Alan keeps bees.Highways and Byways of Beekeeping is a discursive take on the social life of bees and the way we interact with them. It calls for progressive beekeeping practice while avoiding a prescriptive approach to setting up and operating bee hives. Highways and Byways scopes the biology of honey bees and the very remarkable ways that beekeepers have kept them.

There are several sources of serious confusion in the investigations of how bees and humans see grey and black. First, von Frisch trained bees to go to a coloured paper, and then tested whether they could distinguish that colour from a palette of 15 shades of grey placed together on a test board. Unfortunately, he used papers made from wood pulp, which do not reflect ultraviolet, so the UV receptors were excluded. Secondly,16 years later it was shown that bees require a 25% difference in brightness to discriminate grey levels, so his test was uncertain. Thirdly, bees are dichromats, and detect only green contrast and the fraction of light that stimulates the blue receptors. The most interesting confusion is that grey photons do not exist, but that does not affect bees because they are functional dichromats and treat grey like any other colour. No problem. The UV receptors in the compound eyes of the bee are used to detect the direction of the sky to stabilize flight and escape upwards when disturbed. The bee is a sexless herbivore, which may account for its relatively simple retina. Additional colour types of receptor have been found by recording from eyes of some flies, butterflies and dragonflies, presumably for unique recognition of the other sex or prey. However, this is one-purpose vision which does not require much processing or large brain. Full colour vision requires at least three colour types of receptors and a large visual cortex, as in primates.Human vision is more difficult to understand in this context. Black is entirely a hallucination because there are no black photons. White is detected normally with three receptor types acting together, but the brightest objects in sight also look white even though they are green or red, maybe as a calibration. The edges of shiny objects also look white although clearly they are not. Grey is hallucinated as various levels of black where there is white but insufficient illumination to see it as white.These topics are discussed in historical context. However, some who work on the vision of the bee still believe that bees have full colour vision, and many believe that their dog or cat sees only black and white, so called achromatic vision. However, like the bee, they all evolved in world where green predominated, and many things of interest were less blue (e.g., yellow) or more blue than green (e.g., blue), so most mammals evolved as dichromats, without UV or red receptors.

People with a beginner's interest in bees are often disturbed to learn that their bees will die without some form of varroa mite control. I was, and some of mine did. Yet they didn't all perish. Data that I obtained from the Bee Informed Partnership for my region showed that the average overwintering survival rate for the bees of non-migratory beekeepers, even with chemical mite control, is around half. Luck, intuition, skepticism, thrift, research, the observations of others, and the help of generous online mentors has led me to develop a method that has allowed me to overwinter more than two thirds of my colonies consistently without chemical mite control. I have written this book to offer an alternative to traditional methods that have not been working for sustainable beekeeping. This book is meant to save you money and, increase your chances of having a surplus of bees in the spring.Adrian Quiney RN BSN

There has been a change in the beekeeping environment since the first edition in 2012. Today there is a heightened concern about global warming, the natural environment, biodiversity and the need to be guided by science. Among beekeepers there is a greater awareness of these issues with a shift towards sustainable beekeeping; locally-adapted colonies, reduced use of chemicals and concern for pollinators and forage. These concerns are reflected in this second edition. The increased engagement of beekeepers and the questioning of otherwise accepted practices has prompted the title of this edition, Having Healthy Honeybees - the beekeeping & science. This edition both updates the first and extends its scope.Aim is to help beekeepers establish healthy colonies.Emphasis on proper set-up and keeping it simple.Diseases are dealt with in a concise format.New chapters, The Bees & Sustainable Colonies and Forage & Honey.There are over 220 references many on open access. About the AuthorJohn McMullan keeps honeybee colonies in North County Dublin and has an out-apiary in County Galway. He was Honorary Secretary of his local beekeeping Association for twenty five years and has been in contact with many members' colonies over the years. He is an engineer by profession and in 2007 received a doctorate in Zoology (parasitology) from Trinity College Dublin. His particular interest is in the parasites of the honeybee, mainly parasitic mites, and has authored several scientific papers.

Ransome’s The Sacred Bee is classic that has stood the test of time.  It is a must read for anyone interested in the history of beekeeping and beekeeping lore. Gene Kritsky, PhD, author of The Tears of Re: Beekeeping in Ancient Egypt