Hi all
Murray said...
> In 3 mins a colony you gather as much info and perform as much
> management as they do in half an hour, and with a lot less disturbance
> to the colony routine
This is the real difference... Not between amateur or professional
beekeepers, but between those that keep a few bees and those that are
'beekeepers' in the fullest sense of the word.
Referring to NWC he also said...
> I use them too in part of our unit. Yet here they are our largest
> overwintering colonies, and the most heavy users of stores. Of course
> this is compared to the black bee, not to Italians, where the clusters
> and stores consumption would be much greater still. To make comparisons
> you have to be basing things on a like for like basis.
I have no experiance of NWC, but I concur with the differences between
British bees and Italian strains.
I am also in agreement with the statement below...
> Mine is a single deep. Six to eight bars of bees in black bees is a
> respectable winter cluster, and 20Kg of stores is more than enough.
I can take it a little further and say that there are some colonies that
will only require 10 or 11 Kg of stores, but to expand to fill several brood
boxes the bees need nectar and pollen in adequate supply and that is what I
have never had in my region... I saw a graph of nectar resources in USA on
Allen Dick's site... It was smooth and rose through the season, a similar
graph for my area would be a very rough and violently swinging sawtooth or
squarewave function, totally un-predictable.
Big colonies are essential for collecting the largest crops, but there has
to be a crop to be gathered... Murray puts in a great deal of his management
effort into getting his colonies 'right' for one particular crop, if that
crop failed then no matter how many bees he has on the moors, he would get
no honey.
Where I live, heather is only available by transporting colonies and has
never been a part of my beekeeping, my bees can only build in strength
according to the resources available to them, they gather what is available,
whenever it is available and under poor weather conditions. I suspect that
the time nectar is available for in UK may be only 50% of that in US.
You cannot compare different methods in different circumstances. The
criterion for judging a method (whether amateur or commercial) is the way it
fits it's environment and whether or not it gets the best out of that
environment. Murray and I have different methods, but I like to think that
both are equally valid for their particular circumstances.
Best Regards & 73s, Dave Cushman... G8MZY
Beekeeping & Bee Breeding Website
Email: [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask]
http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman & http://www.dave-cushman.net
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