Hi Peter,

Thanks for sharing these videos. I could not get any audio to play so I assume the camera did not record sound.

The first video includes footage of a beekeeper from Nipiwan Saskatchewan. I’m guessing this is Don Peer who was a well known Nipiwan beekeeper during that era.

Scenes shot in Don Peer’s honey house (15 minute mark) show a McFadden uncapper in operation. Maybe someone on this list can tell us the history of these machines. The information I have from the beekeeping grapevine is that this uncapper (in which frames travelled horizontally between vertical knives) was invented by a beekeeper named McFadden who lived in or around Tiverton, Ontario. I believe Mr. McFadden built and sold about 300 of the machines. Watching this video was the first time I have ever seen a McFadden uncapper in operation.

During his university years, Don Peer conducted an interesting experiment to determine how far queens would fly when searching for drones (ten miles).  I could not access the original paper but there is an abstract of it at:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/canadian-entomologist/article/div-classtitlefurther-studies-on-the-mating-range-of-the-honey-bee-span-classitalicapis-melliferaspan-ldiv/8B126801D410AEFDBE08C4A457B729AA

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