hello All,
I buy equipment yearly for various issues. Mostly zipper problems and holes
in veils.

I have been a loyal customer of both Kelley and Dadant.

I have been buying  the top jacket from Dadant mostly due to price.

I do not care for the round veil for serious work as falls off your head at
times when you bend over.

The hooded has a blind spot ( all hooded veils) which is especially bad for
the driver when you are moving trucks around. The round veil has no blind
spots.

The vinyl suits rip to easy for commercial work.

I like the interchangeability of the hoods on the Dadant suits as today we
made up a suit from a jacket with a torn face veil ( xxl) with a hood (xl)
from a jacket with a bad zipper.

Maybe others will comment on their luck with other makers suits or jackets.
One of my guys still uses a pair of white coveralls and the Kelley string
veil. he refuses to put a piece of duct tape across the place the veil pulls
tight and gets a bee in his bonnet once in a while which causes us to
quietly chuckle but he is a big guy and out right laughter pisses him off.

The blind spot of the hooded veil needs addressed as a higher number of
commercial beekeepers are going to the hooded veil. I had a beekeeper trip
over a pallet backing up in his blind spot.

I wear the bugg baffler for mosquitoes most of the time but today the bees
were cranky. I wore a dadant round veil. We worked three yards and I had one
land owner call and complain the bees were buzzing her after we left.

After I explained the plight of the bees and drought she said she was going
to set a wash tub out of water for the bees and a special humming bird
feeder. Said the bees could keep feeding at the humming bird feeders and
getting water at her grandchild's never used wading pool.

When we are doing serious bee work like removing supers and stirring up
strong hives with robbing on the truck with no honey flow you *need* a veil.

The only commercial beekeeping book *in my opinion* to ever come close to
describing commercial beekeeping is "Following the Bloom" by Douglas Whynott
"Across America with the Migratory Beekeepers"

I love the last paragraph in the book:

" As for me, I now have one hive. It sits behind a shed, and the bees stream
through the branches of a cherry tree into the air. "

"I like to watch them,most of all,and now,when I see them making their
sweeping arcs,when they glide down among the crowds of bees at the
entrance,I just watch."

"contraction has followed expansion,and I sometimes think of a Zen saying:"

*at first the mountains were mountains,and then the mountains were not
mountains, but some other thing;
now the mountains are mountains again"

"That sentence comes closest to describing where I am now. I'm not
professing enlightenment, or anything like that. Only that for me ,in some
way, BEES ARE BEES AGAIN"



bob

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html

Guidelines for posting to BEE-L can be found at:
http://honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/guidelines.htm