#beekeeping process

[george275]

Exploring Methods of Apiculture: Techniques and Strategies

In discussing methods of apiculture, one must consider both rural and urban settings. Urban beekeeping, a growing trend in cities, uses methods of apiculture that are adapted to smaller spaces and closer proximity to human habitation. This includes rooftop hives and balcony beekeeping. Conversely, rural methods of apiculture often involve larger apiaries and a focus on pollination for agricultural crops. Both urban and rural methods of apiculture contribute significantly to biodiversity and the pollination of plants. Moreover, these methods of apiculture are essential for the production of honey, beeswax, and other bee-related products.

[jabbage]

Something that's important to remember with creative work is that it takes a lot of time, and you have to accept that it's sometimes going to go a little bit wonky along the way!

I thought I'd remind myself that what eventually became a commercial video game this year started out as me doodling around in 2022.

Song is Doodles by Rose Betts, which might not be precisely appropriate but it's been stuck in my head a while so there you go :D

You can follow the game @beekeeperspicnic

[ragekagegames]

1. whats your favorite thing in your room?

I'm gonna assume this question refers to my office.

Gosh that's so hard because I spend most of my waking time in this room. I'm going to cheat and give two answers 😂 One a bit more practical and one a bit more sentimental.

My gaming PC. It's something that I use every day, is definitely the most expensive thing in here, and I'm pretty proud that I learned how to build and upgrade PCs just to make this. I've worked really hard over the years to get my gaming/streaming setup the way it is.

My beekeeper painting. I'm pretty sure this is the only surviving piece from the undergraduate painting course I took. It's travelled with me for 13 years now (three states, four cities, at least 10 different homes). It hangs off-screen just to the right of the cork board in the photo above.

The original piece is called The Caretaker (1988) by Stephen Bush.

The sketch layers were traced via opaque projector (the project was meant to test our painting skills, not drawing skills 😅).

Acrylic paint on cardboard, cut out to layer the back, mid, and foreground.

[bird-reassignment-surgery]

Hot take but TERFs and Zionists and shit shouldn’t be welcomed. Anywhere. I don’t care if “this is a bird group, we need to keep it welcoming and free of politics!!” Get the fuck out of here.

[selfconsumerofmywoes]

when people say something that makes you realise that you are actually known >>>

[doctormead]

DP x DC prompt: Beekeeper Danny

Ooookay, Danny has moved to Gotham for <insert reason here> and is faced with a problem. Yes, Gotham has higher levels of ambient ectoplasm than your average city, but it's nowhere near those of Amity Park who has a goddamn artificial hell mouth smack in the center of it. Also, the ectoplasm which IS there is contaminated with some nasty shit that makes Danny feel ill when he takes too much of it in. Having his friends back in Amity Park ship him flasks of pure ecto on the sly is difficult to say the least, so he starts thinking about ways to both concentrate and purify Gotham's ecto so he's not one shipment interruption from being in really bad shape.

He get's his solution from Sam. On his bi-weekly video call with her and Tucker, she gets to ranting about bee conservation. Tucker makes a joking comment about honey being basically bee vomit, and Sam tears into him saying "That is a gross oversimplification at best and outright bee-slander at worst!" This perks Danny's curiosity, so he looks up the biological process by which bees turn nectar into honey...and he's found his answer. Blob ghosts are basically the filter feeders of the Ghost Zone/Infinite Realms. If he can get a bunch of them to behave kinda like honey bees, his ecto supply should be assured.

It works...a bit too well...

Now Danny has a swarm of glowing green honey bees that are roughly the size of carpenter bees buzzing happily about him. Their queen is roughly the size of a large hummingbird. He heaves a weary sigh and starts looking up how to ACTUALLY keep bees and making skips out of ghost-friendly material for them to build their hive in on top of his apartment building.

But, won't Danny get complaints from his neighbors? Here's the kicker. Unless you are a 1) ghost, 2) halfa, 3) wearing specialized Fenton Ecto-Visual Goggles or 4) a mage, you cannot see, hear or feel the bees! They're buzzing around Gotham happily, slurping up the ecto to take back to the hive for processing. And they slurp it up from EVERYWHERE...including certain people.

Jason Todd is slightly confused but not about to look a gift horse in the mouth. Over the last few months, the Pit Rage has been decreasing gradually. He doesn't think much about it until he shows up at the BatCave for an all hands meeting that has been called because John Constantine needed to brief them on something...only for Con-job to take one look at Red Hood and shout that he's "COVERED IN FUCKING BEES!!!"

[feralrarity]

Random take no one ask for: being vegan is by no means more ethical than sustainable farming/hunting but a lot of the time it can be a good median of sustainability and more affordable for low income households like mine.

Being vegan for me is foraging wild garlic and mustang grapes and dandelions which I can all find right outside the suburbs in wooded road medians. It's buying rice and beans and various home grown veggies and eating well while not sacrificing extra $ for protein and iron.

I feel like a lot of the time veganism removes humanity from the food chain when taken to extremes but really it's the best thing I can do for my family when the price of un-tortured chicken eggs are that high.

[beekeeperspicnic]

Welp we're officially at 150 reviews for The Beekeeper's Picnic on Steam, and so as promised I have officially paid the developer fees (that's $100 I will never recoup) to begin the process of submitting the MYCROFT HOLMES SIMULATOR for free release on Steam!

(I say 'begin the process' because it's going to take me a while to jump through all the required hoops, watch this space for an actual release date I guess. But If you can't wait, it's already available on Itch.io!)

FEATURES OF MYCROFT HOLMES SIMULATOR 1895:

EXPLORE the famous Diogenes Club

WALK at a very leisurely pace!

BE QUIET and refuse to talk to a wide range of delightful characters!

OBSERVE things, without having to act on them!

MYSTERIES! There aren't any!

* It's not set in 1895.

To be clear this is a game in the loosest definition of the term. It's kind of an... experience. And it'll take you 15 minutes if you're very very slow about it, which of course Mycroft would approve of.

[ahsoka-in-a-hood]

I'm going to indulge in a little PSA

It's bee swarming season! So this is my friendly reminder to, if you find yourself with a swarm, please do not call an exterminator. Bees are not pests. There's bound to be some sort of beekeeping association in your area, and there will almost certainly be a beekeeper with room for more bees who will come and scoop up your swarm for free and give them a little bee house. Where I live the fire station keeps a list of beekeepers for this exact situation so people call them.

Also a general background on swarming: swarming is a normal part of bee reproduction. In spring the population of a healthy colony will expand rapidly, and they soon run out of space in their nest. So they will raise new queens and the colony will split, with half of them accompanying the old queen to a new location some distance away. Scouts will spend a day or two looking for a good place to nest while the swarm balls up somewhere waiting for a decision. Swarming bees are surprisingly unaggressive and can basically be scooped into a box.

(Beekeepers do generally try to have some control over this reproductive process. Loose swarms don't have great survival rates, and also that's half your colony gone with the wind. If they want the colony to split, they tend to pre-empt them and just move the half of the colony with the old queen into a new hive while they're still raising the new ones. They can also sell half a colony to another beekeeper. If they'd rather they did not split, they'll keep giving them more space in the hive to expand into. A beekeeper can lose control of the situation though- imagine you had weeks of late rain/cold, preventing you from opening the hive to do any of that, and then the weather breaks and your bees, who have been going stir-crazy that whole time, are gone before you got your boots on. It can happen. There are some beekeepers who do clip the queen's wings so she can't swarm, which sounds very tricky to do tbh and not common practice for amateurs.)

Anyway: if you see a swarm, don't call an exterminator, find a beekeeper!

[elbiotipo]

It's interesting how much stuff you need in order to form a civilization other than just food agriculture and metalworking. You need tanneries to turn hides into leather that can be used for clothes, bags, waterskins, shoes, etc. You need hemp or cotton or flax for textiles and cordage, and you need a large amount of people working on turning plant fiber into those. You need carpenters and masons and stonecutters and brickmakers to build your cities and roads, you need an absurd amount of pottery for the sake of storing food and water and wine, you need butchers and shepherds to obtain hides, tallow, knucklebones, materials for bowstring (hair, sinews) and meat, you need miners to obtain metals and precious stones and normal stones and certain chemicals, you need dyers to make your clothes look good, you may need coopers to make barrels if you're tired of pottery, fishers, breweries for beer and mead, beekeepers for honey and wax, shipwrights and longshoremen and sailors and sailmakers for any aquatic activity, charcoal burners for most of your fuel, porters and merchants to move things around, jurists and bureaucrats and architects and engineers to organise everything, etc. etc.etc.

it's impressive that throughout most of human history all of these trades combined were still a minority of the population compared to agricultural workers

I think this is always a great thing to keep in mind when learning history or writing fiction in historical/fantasy settings. Mostly everything we take for granted now is the result of industrial mass manufacturing processes. Just a century ago if that, most things were artisanally done. The amount of professions, some that are rather obscure today and now are practically lost (for example, ALL the very specific jobs in carpentry like wheelers and fletchers), is staggering. It's very worth to remember and record how they work, as they sometimes are the last ones that know their craft...

EUGENIO MONESMA FANDOM RISE UP

However I would slightly disagree with the fact that agricultural workers knew no trade. I would think that the average peasant (for a very loose definition) anywhere in the world was probably more skilled than the average person today. For one, they did have to build their houses, which means skills in whatever material was available. For another thing, most fiber processing and clothes making was done in personal houses or the local village, most overwhelmingly by women. Hunting, and thus butchering, was often a supplement to the rural diet, as well as brewing, alcohol making, thatching and pottery... of course, many of these were specialized jobs and few peasants would be blacksmiths for example, but I think I can say with some confidence that the average person in an agricultural economy had more skills than we think. Of course, this was because they had to do backbreaking labor by themselves to survive.

It is still worth remembering the basic fact, however, that over 80% or 90% of the world population during historical times was indeed composed of agricultural laborers of one sort or another. The times we live today are really unique if we think about this.

[jasminumdew]

Bear & Honey

Bear!Price x Beekeeper!Reader

Tag: fem reader, bear shifter John Price Word count:  638

It’s the second winter you’ll spend in this town. This one seems quite more brutal, with snow filling the ground in the beginning of November. Your beehives are all wrapped up, prepared for the bitter season. The bees started to become less active than in the warmer seasons since there were no flower fields blooming within this town in this temperature. To assist them, you mixed some sugar syrup and left it on the hive-top feeder. The beehives have been here for only half a year, so you’re not the most experienced when it comes to taking care of them. But your neighbor - John Price - was a great helper. You didn’t miss the way his crinkle eyes deepened when you asked him for help building the beehives. He sometimes stops by after work to check the frames or just to have some tablespoons of honey from you. He always offers to help you out, cause “that’s what neighbors are for, right?”. 

However, recently you’ve been quite concerned over his health. John seems to be vulnerable to the cold, you thought, for last winter you never saw him go outside. At first you thought he went out of town, but the dim yellow light of the heater through his windows says otherwise. The only interaction was that every two weeks he texted you, pleading with you to buy him some food and a big jar of wild honey. You didn’t mind driving a few extra miles to help your hot, older neighbor a bit. Poor guy, too sick to take care of himself, so you cooked an extra portion every meal then left it at his front porch. 

Last Sunday morning John went over your fences. There are bears around in this area lately, he said, though you’ve never seen or heard one, but John’s been living here for so long, so he must be right. Little did you know, the beehives are all destroyed by this early morning. All the honey was licked and devoured, even the frames were chewed and left the scattered debris all over the yard. You choked out a cry, throat tightening and eyes burning red, seeing months of your hard work dying out in front of you. It cannot be fixed, with the majority of the colony being eaten like this. The fences that John set up himself were also smashed by its massive weight. 

You immediately call John to come by, in fear of bears still lurking around. The phone keeps beeping but he never answers. Your heart was beating like a drum in your chest, since your houses were so close to each other, could it be that John has already encountered the bear and was attacked by it? You instantly grab the nearby uncapping knife and run to his house. The front door was wide open, deep scratches on the wall and his wallpaper being torn, the smell of grass and honey lingers in the air of his house exposing the presence of the unwanted intruder. Your body shivers, you slowly head to his kitchen where you heard his voice.

“John? Are you okay?”.  Before you finished your sentence, you saw John shape-shift into a giant brown bear just a few meters from you. His head snaps to your direction and runs towards you immediately. Before your head can even process what to do next, he pushes you to fall on your back, using his big furry body to pin you down. “Shh, don’t yell, calm down love”. Your lungs are burning from lack of air as you struggle to push him off of you. “I’m sorry for your hives, darling. I was starving, you’ll understand, right? You’ve been such a good girl for me. I can fix it in the spring, but for now, you’ll stay here with me”.

Note: this is my first time writing fiction so I know it's not really good, but I hope you guys had fun reading this.

[aquavierra]

Why I want Seb so bad:

He is a nerd, a dork and most importantly, he's a little shit

Former RB driver that sucked Mark Webber's dry from happiness and life [insert dirty jokes here]

But got his redemption arc as another depressed Ferrari driver who got everyone into his side for good

Became the father figure of the sport and accidentally adopted everyone on the grid in the process

I don't know what's up with Aston Martin but that team really brought something out from the DILFs they hired

On his beekeeping journey

Had emo phase

Could be a PR nightmare and a sweetheart to everyone and I mean, everyone...

He could be rocking the most pathetic outfits out there and I'd still love him

He looks so awkward in every photoshoot I've seen except for Pepe Jeans (salute to the photographer who ate and left no crumbs)

[amons-hat-enthusiast]

A petition to stop Rio Tinto’s mine from destroying Serbia’s nature

"We call upon you to prohibit extractive mining projects and metal processing in the Jadar Valley in Serbia.

In particular, we demand that you cancel the proposed Rio Tinto lithium mine in Loznica. We demand that you protect the biodiversity, fertile ground, farming villages and rich cultural areas.

Serbia’s most fertile land can be found in the beautiful Jadar Valley. Small family farmers grow raspberries and plums, engage in beekeeping and sheep and goat herding. The valley borders mountains, is surrounded by water and home to thousands of sustainable multi-generational farms.

But instead of protecting it, the Serbian government has approved a project with multinational mining corporation Rio Tinto, for the exploitation of “Jadarite”, a lithium ore in the valley. The government and the company have ignored scientists and mining experts who advise vehemently against the mine and are threatening to cause irreparable damage to the water, land, air and it’s people. Local citizens, who do not want to give up their sustainable agricultural land which has been in their families for generations, are being ignored.

The process of separating chemically stable lithium from jadarite ore involves the use of concentrated sulfuric acid. The process would take place 20 km from the Drina River and use 300 cubic meters of water every hour, while the chemically treated water would be returned to the Jadar River.

The outpouring of inevitably polluted water, as well as underground waters which contain arsenic, mercury and lead, would contaminate entire river basins and continue their journey across the Jadar to the Drina and Sava, polluting not only Serbia's but other countries' water sources as well.

We reject the pollution of the air. Treatment with the above mentioned (and additional) aggressive acids produces toxic gases that can spread within a radius of over ten kilometers and which will corrode the skin and lungs of humans and animals.

We reject the endangerment of the population around the Jadar Valley in the interests of a multinational corporate profit. Rio Tinto has promised 700 new jobs, but forgot to mention that 19,000 people are set to be displaced or severely effected.

Rio Tinto in 2020, destroyed a 45,000 year old sacred Australian Aboriginal cave. The company and its representatives have been repeatedly convicted of fraud and paid billions of dollars in damages and fines for illegal destruction of land, but continue to ravage and destroy natural environment around the world. The company is accused of participating in war crimes in Papua New Guinea, where a ten-year civil war broke out due to the presence of their mine.

The citizens of Serbia have the right to clean air, clean water and healthy living conditions. Stop Rio Tinto’s lithium mine and protect the people, our heritage, our environment and the rivers of the Jadar Valley. United we can save our environment."

https://action.wemove.eu/sign/2023-03-stop-rio-tinto-EN?akid=s1568260..uAF-ha

The text above explains the situation. This is a very important petition and I'd be very grateful if you could sign it and spread it.

(I see that only people from European countries can sign it, others please reblog for this to reach as many people as possible)

[neil-gaiman]

Hi Neil,

I've borrowed a copy of Trigger Warning from the library and have just got past The Case of Death and Honey and I wanted to know your thought process behind the story. I've always loved the Sherlock Holmes books and retiring to keep bees never felt like a fitting end for the character, but honestly I never would have considered the route you took.

You referenced Professor Presbury and the Adventures of the Creeping Man, honestly one of my least favourites, but in a way that allows it to be ridiculous. So the solution isn't a fatal dose of monkey testicles but simply Watson taking creative liberties. I really liked that.

Thank you. I'm very proud of that story. I came up with the idea of Sherlock and the honey when I was about 19 and tried to write a story with it in. I wrote a few pages and never finished it (I never finished anything back then.) 30 years later I was asked for a Sherlock story (and I had been a beekeeper for 5 years at that point) and I knew how to tell it.

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: Honey

Honey

Sweet, viscous liquid food, dark golden in colour, produced in the honey sacs of various bees from the nectar of flowers.

Flavour and colour are determined by the flowers from which the nectar is gathered.

Some of the most commercially desirable honeys are produced from clover by the domestic honeybee.

The nectar is ripened into honey by inversion of the major portion of its sucrose sugar into the sugars levulose (fructose) and dextrose (glucose) and by the removal of excess moisture.

Honey is marketed in several different forms: liquid honey, comb honey, and creamed honey. Sometimes the predominant floral type from which the honey was collected is indicated.

Liquid Honey

If liquid (strained, extracted) honey is desired, additional supers are added directly above the brood nest.

When one is largely filled, it is raised and another is placed underneath.

This may continue until several have been filled, each holding from 30 to 50 pounds (14 to 23 kilograms), or until the nectar flow has ended.

After the bees have evaporated the water until the honey is of the desired consistency and sealed in the cells, the combs are removed, the cells uncapped with the uncapping knife, and the honey extracted.

The removed honey is immediately heated to about 140 °F (60 °C), which thins it and destroys yeasts that can cause fermentation.

It is then strained of wax particles and pollen grains, cooled rapidly, and packaged for market.

Comb Honey

In production of honey in the comb, or comb honey, extreme care is necessary to prevent the bees’ swarming. The colony must be strong, and the bees must be crowded into the smallest space they will tolerate without swarming.

New frames or sections of a frame with extra-thin foundation wax, added at exactly the right time for the bees to fill without destroying them, are placed directly above the brood nest. The bees must fill and seal the new comb to permit removal within a few days, or it will be of inferior quality.

As rapidly as sections are removed, new sections are added, until the nectar flow subsides. Then these are removed and the colony given combs to store its honey for the winter.

Creamed Honey

Almost all honey will granulate or turn to sugar.

Such honey can be liquefied without materially affecting its quality by placing the container in water heated to about 150 °F (66 °C).

Liquid and granulated honey is sometimes blended, homogenized, and held at a cool temperature, which speeds uniformly fine granulation.

If properly processed, the granules will be extremely fine; the honey, which has a smooth, creamy appearance, is referred to as creamed honey.

Floral Types

Some honeys are sold by floral type; that is, they are given the name of the predominant flowers visited by the bees when they accumulated the honey.

The beekeeper has no way to direct the bees to a particular source of food but through experience learns which plants are the major sources of honey.

Different flowers produce different colours and flavours of honey. It may be heavy-bodied or thin-bodied, dark or light, mild-flavoured or strong-flavoured.

Most honey has been blended by the beekeeper to a standard grade that can be supplied and marketed year after year.

Different regions in California produce distinctive honeys:

Orange Blossom Honey: Sourced mainly from Southern California's vast citrus orchards.

Sage Honey: Harvested in the coastal areas and foothills.

Buckwheat Honey: Found in Northern California, with a robust, molasses-like flavor.

Sources: 1 2 3 ⚜ More: References ⚜ On Beekeeping ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs

[brf-rumortrackinganon]

Archived Link

I cannot decide what my favorite part of this article is so just read the whole thing. My top 4:

In episode one, we’re treated to a glimpse of Meghan’s bees and told that women should do scary, important things, like keeping bees. In an incredibly relatable, affordable, and woman-affirming twist, she’s hired a professional (male, natch) beekeeper to do all the actual “scary” work for her, as she stands at a safe distance, dancing in a beekeeper suit and coos “good vibes for good hives” to the hive that is totally hers, and something she absolutely has seen before in her yard. I truly believe the only time she’s been near any part of this process previously is to scoop honeycomb from the trays, as it is the only thing we see her take part in.

(Meghan’s guests often do the actual work while she faffs about in the kitchen, telling stories of her legendary hostessing skills)

Through it all, there is the clapping. Meghan is constantly clapping, with her hands lifted high in front of her face, fingers perfectly straight and flat. Greeting a friend who has just come over? Clap. Taking a drink order? Clap. Tasting a bite of food? Clap and a wiggle. If you made a drinking game centered around every time Meghan claps, you’d end each episode on the floor.

She hosts a sort of launch party for her new persona — Meghan Sussex — a title for a job she didn’t want to keep.