Facultatively eusocial great banded furrow-bee Halictus scabiosae:(a) female with pollen on whole body, Toulouse, France;i and(b) contiguous 1-5 queen nests, Geneva, Switzerland.ii Alan Wade Social bees, not honey bees Sometimes we might ponder about how we […]
Muttabuttasaurus when the first social bees emerged.Australian National Museum, 16 June 2023.Photo: Alan Wade Alan Wade In the beginning In the beginning were the insects: And the Lord said unto Moses, Stretch out thine hand […]
Frontispiece Aggregated not social mud wasp nests Alan Wade Combs and narrow passageways are the hallmarks of the social members of the giant insect order Hymenoptera. The ants and social wasps and bees that occupy […]
Alan Wade In this month’s Bee Buzz Box introduction, we learnt that not only do different species of honey bee vary greatly in their metrics but that other factors, such as nutrition and geographic variation, […]
Alan Wade One of the many challenges faced by the novice beekeeper is knowing when and how to add supers to their hives. A seemingly equally difficult task is deciding when to take supers off […]
Alan Wade Tom Theobald is the essence of beekeeping folklore. Of a retrospective on Tom, Rachel Gabel writing from The FencePosti records Miles McGaughey, an early associate of Tom’s, saying that: …he first knew of […]
Alan Wade In the 1950s an eminent group of American apiarists collaborated to present a coherent approach to spring hive management. They realised that the processes of honey bee population buildup, swarm preparation and queen […]
Alan Wade Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go;Ring out the false, ring in the true. In MemoriamiAlfred Lord Tennyson – […]
Alan Wade Much can be learnt from close inspection of brood combs. That is quite all apart from examining brood for the telltale signs of disease. What do we look for when we open up […]
Alan Wade In this episode, we delve deeper into the biology of the giant honey bees, magnificent insects, but emphatically fearsome creatures. Here we review the defining features of the known giant honey bees. With […]