Yesterday at this time we got zapped by the famous Florida lightning! (Not the hockey team.) It hit two of the tallest sand pine trees, forking to the ground, blowing out one of the TVs, frying one of the modems, a lightpost, and cracking one post of the Tilly garden gate in half. That was scary and the closest we’ve ever been in twenty+ years…Citrus county may not get as many hurricanes, but you’re not safe from lightning anywhere in Florida! (The weather or the hockey team!)
Jan 2015 – Newbie homesteaders in Florida lost their entire hive to marauder bees. The home bees attempted to defend themselves, but even adding a reducer at the entrance and covering the hive with a sheet to keep the renegade bees out did not help. “It only took 24 hours…everything in the hive was gone.” A neighboring beekeeper suggested that the bees may have destroyed their own hive and left, when they saw that they couldn’t win the fight.
Where do marauder bees come from? Bees that run out of pollen sources or have too much honey taken out of the hive, and are not supplemented with sugar water, have to go out raiding other hives.
There’s not too much information about it on youTube or searching on Google. I did find this entry in “Routledge’s Cheap Literature”. It’s a book written by John George Wood, and published in 1862.
Lovely illustrations…
The author’s advice for discouraging the marauders is to make the reducer into a tunnel or tube, in hopes that the villains will not venture in. We’ll have to try it…but the book is great if you would like to read it on Google eBooks. Search for ‘marauder bees’…
Anyone have any other advice?
Best,
U.M. Schin
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Kombucha is a tea based organic drink that can be flavored with organic fruit concentrate (we like Black Cherry). The starter ferments for about 9 days, then is added to the bottles with the flavor concentrate and stored in the dark for 24 hours. It develops a nice fizz. Refrigerate and the drink will keep for up to two months (although it never lasts that long!) |