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23rd August, 2008 - Graduation From Bee School Today was the last day of Bee School and time for the training bees to be moved from the school to their new home in our garden.
Like all end-of-term school activities, there was a recap of the year, a discussion about what to do next, plus a small celebration of cider and cake.
To be fair, this was not the most interesting Bee School lesson and what should have taken no more than an hour was painfully dragged out over 3½ hours.
Despite this, Dan learned an amazingly useful tip, which justified the endurance.
Our soft fruit have been attacked by wasps and although there are plenty of chemical sprays to get rid of the little buggers, they all have a devastating affect on our bees.
During the question and answer session at school Dan discovered something that sets bees and wasps apart...
...bees are tea-total, whereas wasps are alcoholics!
How does this help? Well, very simply, most wasp traps involve a jar of sugary liquid. Now normally, this will also attract the bees and they will suffer the same fate as the wasps.
However, when filling the wasp trap with the sugar solution, one should also mix in an alcoholic drink such as a glass of wine or bottle of beer.
Bees are repelled by the alcohol, but the wasps (who are nothing more than 'chavs' of the insect world) will do anything for a mouthful of 'Diamond White' or 'WKD Blue'
Unfortunately, as Steve (one of the other English students at bee school) pointed out there is a downside to this - you do have to sacrifice a glass of wine!
At the end of Bee school, it was time to collect our training bees and take them home.
So for the second time this year, our Citroen Picasso was used to transport of hive of bees home (not something that you see on the car adverts).
Although positioned next to the other hive, the training bees will remain in their smaller (training) hive until next Spring when they will have to be put into a full size hive (oh dear, another trip to the bee shop!!!) View The Blog Read All Bee Stories |
