> 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.