It is consistently an extraordinary delight meeting individuals who work with bumble bees. Everyone that I have conversed with on my movements so far obviously adores their work, and they are continuously ready to impart their insight and experience to me. Honey bee laborers should have tremendous persistence since they endure my blundering lines of addressing as I wrestle with my voice recorder and notes, attempting to sound ambiguously proficient. At the point when I get back home and pay attention to the meetings, I am normally ready to understand it and transform it into pages that perusers will one day see as edifying, entrancing, silly and invigorating… I trust. That’s what I reason assuming I like understanding it, there should be another person out there who appreciates it as well, and any beekeeper expecting to gain will without a doubt wish to hear from the masters on my hit list.
I as of late visited Murray McGregor, proprietor of Denrosa apiaries, at his elusive yet exceptionally wonderful bungalow close to Blairgowrie in Perthshire, Scotland. It sits next to a little loch which had generally frozen solid. The enormous area of encompassing area is populated with core hives, incalculable mating hive stands, a sovereign raising shed, a fake flying predators to frighten away woodpeckers, Unimog vans and different other gear. After a visit through a portion of his apiaries at the edges of the valleys of streams Earn and Tay, we got together with Jolanta Modliszewska at Denrosa’s base camp in Coupar Angus. Jolanta was cutting and pressing heather brush honey, which is something bizarre to do on a Saturday evening, however arranges should be satisfied, and there is a lot of interest for this top quality item. There were a large number pictures of sloths on the wall. Who doesn’t adore sloths? In any case, her genuine space is the sovereign raising activity, so we drove her back to the honey bee shed where I stuck a recorder right in front of her and did my blundering question schedule.
Jolanta has been working for Murray for a long time. For the initial not many years she was assisting working honey bees in the field, yet she stood apart from the group regarding both fitness and energy for the honey bees and energetically seized the opportunity to lay out Denrosa’s sovereign raising activity. She was flown out to Cyprus to prepare with Roger White where she immediately got abilities like joining, setting up cell manufacturer and finisher settlements, utilizing the hatchery, accomplishing fruitful matings, getting and denoting the mated sovereigns and everything connected with keeping her highness solid and well.
In her most memorable year at the new Blairgowrie mating station Jolanta got going with 150 mating boxes, and the outcomes were exceptionally reassuring. From that point forward it has consistently developed to 900 mating boxes split between two areas, and word is spreading around the beekeeping local area about the nature of the sovereigns delivered. Murray gladly educated me that main last week the Scottish honey bee monitor and someone at the science foundation had both been extremely free about the task. Albeit most of the sovereigns brought are for go through underway settlements to make that delectable heather honey, a rising number are being offered to different beekeepers. Murray has a lot of ability to extend that side of the business and will unquestionably do as such. I will put in a request myself next season since they are extraordinary honey bees and presently I have perceived how they are made, and by whom.
I will save a large number of the specialized subtleties of how the skilled Ms Modliszewska makes her sovereigns for my book, yet I can express a couple of things. She utilizes a Chinese style uniting device and is quick to bring up that it must have the bamboo reed, not plastic. She utilizes minuscule mating boxes of the Kieler type. Murray brings back bundles of working drones shaken from settlements out in the field, and a proportion of these go into the mating box and a recently arisen virgin sovereign is presented. Jolanta places fixed sovereign cells into the hatchery at around day eleven, so a couple of days after the fact the virgin arises into its roller confine on day fourteen, and in the span of two days it has another home in a little mating box with the recently shaken specialists.
When the sovereign is mated, she is gotten, eliminated, set apart with a shaded speck on her chest, and put in a sovereign enclosure for transportation somewhere else. Her place is taken by a fixed sovereign cell from a finisher province (not an arose virgin) and on it goes. Jolanta found that virgin sovereigns work best in recently made mating boxes yet sovereign cells work best whenever they are laid out with drawn brush and brood. The cell is safeguarded with aluminum foil folded over it, which further develops the acknowledgment rate. Mating achievement is extremely subject to the climate, which can be pointless in these parts, yet in general Murray figures they get around 60%-70% mated. At times in the event that it is too cold or too blustery the virgins won’t pass on their comfortable homes to go on a mating flight, and assuming they are still virgins following fourteen days they are shaken out, and the entire situation must be begun once more.
The reproducer sovereigns live in 5 edge poly core hives put close to the honey bee shed. These are the very best sovereigns, painstakingly chose by Murray and took back to be utilized for reproducing solely after showing how them can be remarkable. Murray has more than 3,000 states of honey bees so he can be extremely picky. Each sovereign is known by a code; the prefix “J” is for Jolanta, and this is trailed by numbers successively. Evidently, sovereign “J21” is a great one, and “J7” is exceptionally old and extremely dear to the consistently defensive Jolanta. She says that she will cry when J7 bites the dust. I dread that might be soon as she is seven years of age! These sovereigns live longer than creation sovereigns since they are kept in little provinces and don’t lay however many eggs every year as a sovereign heading a monster state. They are the moms of the greater part of Denrosa’s states and a significant number of the excellent sovereigns offered to clients, in spite of the fact that Murray keeps variety by getting raiser sovereigns from abroad as well. Both Murray and Jolanta concur that the Carniolan subspecies really does best in their space, yet any sovereign of any sort gets into the program assuming she’s sufficient.
At the point when I got some information about her main thing from the sovereign raising cycle, she said, “Getting sovereigns,” so she can “see her new children.” She really likes her sovereigns and is a stickler, which is plainly essential for the justification for her accomplishments up until this point. I inquired as to whether she had found any parts of the gig troublesome. “No,” she said, “I have found everything quite simple, truth be told.” Murray contributed with a giggle, “she finds one thing troublesome – following requests!”
If it’s not too much trouble, visit my blog at http://www.thewalrusandthehoneybee.com and by following it you will get an opportunity to get a free marked duplicate of my impending book “Meetings with Beekeepers” whenever it is distributed. Much obliged!
