> From:    Jon C Peacock <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: aggressive hive
 
Hi Jon
 
Thanks for the nice repply to my post.
 
Jon mentioned he would be interested to know the following:
 
> or talk.  I will confin comments to beekeeping. [1] What type of hive do
> you use?  We use the Langstroth hive.  I read about the "Half barrel
> hive" said to be used in Africa.  The periodicals read are the 'American
> Bee Journal' or 'Gleanings in Bee Culture'.
 
We use the Langstroth as pretty much the standard, with most of the
people I know keeping a single deep as a brood box, and a shallow
super arrangement. Ten frames brood and eight or nine in the super.
There are two types of bees in SA, the Cape bee and the Transvaal
bee. The transvaal bee is the one invading the US at present. Here it
is the best producer of the two. Cape bees are not very keen on
building up, so they run roughly the same size brood nest the whole
year given then chance (give or take a frame or two) -  in other
words if you keep them near stuff that is flowering they keep laying.
Apparently the Transvaal bees are more prone to building up. As a
result I can get by without using an excluder as the queen stays in
the brood box on her own.
 
Rural beekeeping projects have as far as I know tried to get rural
black communities mainly to set up simple top bar hives, but these
areas are not prone to success and usually as soon as the persone who
was 'teaching' leaves the hives fall to pieces and are stolen etc.
(The brood nest makes a nice beer)
 
Further North in Zimbabwe there is more rural beekeeping, but this is
with the transvaal bee which is able to defend itself. Commercial
beekeepers are also quite well developed there with a large
pollination industry and excelent honey yields. I have a friend who
used to keep bees there and she mentions getting as many as eight
supers (shallows) per hive in a flow, and they get a number of good
flows depending on el nino and so on. They also use mainly langstroth
and many people use two brood boxes during buildup.
 
The main honey producing plants here are the eucalyptus species
(saligna plantations), sunflowers and lucerne (that I know of).
 
I think that up in Kenya and Uganda there is quite a bit of
beekeeping on a rural basis in what I remember being called a
Ethiopian Long .... hive, which I gather has been adapted for
community projects. I think this has been successful in some places
like Botswana. (We are talking very large distance here though.
Because of the projection on maps it is easy to think that africa is
quite small, but for scale it is about 2000km (1000 or so miles) from
my town to Harare the capital of Zimbabwe and quite a few thousand
more to Nairobi (Kenyan Capital) and the infrastructure is only
really worth speaking about to the Zimbabwe Border. From there on it
is darkest africa and we hear little about it.
 
Bees apparently contribute about US$500 000 to the local economy in
terms of the fruit industry. (I got that of a poster from the
University of the Western Cape that is launching a big programme to
classify all the bee viruses affecting south african/southern african
bees)
 
>At my age, I've learned;
> believe nothing you hear, half of what you see and one tenth of what you
> read.
 
This is a great policy!
  And then I look at it from the 4 directions.  [2] Human sweat,
> beer on the breath, some perfumes, old stings in clothing, and fuzzy dark
> (animal like) watch bands or socks or dog odor and some animal odors will
 
I have only ever noticed the fluffy socks thing of these as well as
the dog odor. (My rottweilers and ridgeback hate bees and vice versa)
 
> make a hive go ballistic.  I have attended to hive in pastures of horses
> and cows and in the heavy wooded areas with a lot of wild deer, with
 
My bees occasionally sting the cows nearby. Makes the udders look a
bit funny, so I have to herd them away when I work the bees on two of
my sites.
 
> little or no problem. Often a cow will turn over a hive, scratching her
> hide, I suppose.  Bears are a big problem in the mountains north of me.
> 12 years ago a bear laid waste to my bee yard in the South Carolina.
 
We have a similar problem but with baboons. they lift the lid of and
run. I don't know why, but I have wathced it happen and it is
hilarius to watch. My trick is just to put a really big rock on the
hive, and they banging gets the bees cross and the baboon goes before
the lid is of.
 
> Skunks are attacked on sight.  Bees attacking a bird is a new thing to
> me.  We have birds that eat bees, but not on a constance daily basis.
> How large is this bird, the ? .  Sorry, I've lost your earlier e-mail and
> don't know the name of the bird.
 
The main bird is called a Fork Tailed Dronga, which in Afrikaans is
called a 'byevreter' which means bee eater and Xhosa an Ubu.... which
I gather means a thing which sits on swarms.( An Ubu is a swarm - ubu
interestingly enough means 'working together') The bird is about the
size of a european starling or a fat canary. It is extremely agile
eating queens  and drones out of preference, but also eating bees. It
catches a bee and then checks to see what it is. If it is a worker it
will land on a tree branch nearby and will scrape the sting out on a
branch and eat the bee. The problem here is that the birds sit on the
hive box in the winter when they cannot spare enough bees to mount an
attack and then it eats workers as they come in, getting the nectar
as well. If a worker get's by it puts out a fear pheremone and the
hive just shuts down, so one looses about two hours of foraging on
each end of the day. This is bad as there is a good honey flow in
winter from the eucalyptus and aloes and so on. I think the dronga is
one of the reasone our bees have evolved the ability of a laying
worker to lay worker eggs. (big problem) As soon as it is warm enough
the drongas move away to the trees and eat foragers, as if they come
near the hive they are shredded. Doves also get attacked bu I have
never seen a dove eating a bee. Honey guides are not attacked, I
don't know why though.
 
> when the weather is hot, bright sun and the bees are foraging.  [4] Did I
> mis read? You work AHB without a veil.  Stings on the legs, arms or upper
> body, I don't mind, I keep the away from my face -- :-) 99 percent of the
 
It depends on the hive, but yes, most of the time I can get away
withoug a veil. Our bees are not true AHB though and are quite
gentle. I hate weating a suit as it is hot and I fear for my life
more from falling of scaffolding when removing a hive than from the
bee stings. As a result I can often work a hive, including the brood
nest without a suit (only a smoker) having learnt from trial and
error how to tell if the bees are cross. The errors mean I have at
present got 36 little red dots on my hands from a hive that had a
sticky lid.
 
> time. [5] In the states, we aren't allowed to keep the AHB.  To do so
> would remove a large amount of American dollars from the pocket.
> Therefor we are unable to compare AHB cells against our Italian cells.
 
I think it would be the easiest way of checking though if you think
you may have an AHB colony as the cells are much smaller.
 
Anyhow, once again thanks.
 
Keep well
 
Garth
---
Garth Cambray       Kamdini Apiaries
15 Park Road        Apis melifera capensis
Grahamstown         800mm annual precipitation
6139
Eastern Cape
South Africa               Phone 27-0461-311663
 
3rd year Biochemistry/Microbiology    Rhodes University
In general, generalisations are bad.
Interests: Flii's and Bees.