A little work but worth it.
Homemade Yogurt with Butter Toasted Walnuts and Honey
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Wednesday, January 9, 2013
50 degree day
Was able to visit the Bees today as it was 50° with no wind. Multiple dead bees on outside of supers but that's to be expected. Lots of sign of the bees taking their cleansing flights which they will do when it warms up during the winter. I didn't smoke them before I opened the lid and some did come out and attach themselves to my suit. The main reason I visited them today is to make sure that they were still living and to give them supplemental feed.
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
Honey and Cinnamon
The combination of honey and cinnamon has been used for centuries in both traditional Chinese and Ayurveda, a system of healing founded 5000 years ago in India. The two ingredients with unique healing abilities have a long history as a home remedy. Cinnamon is one of the oldest spices known to mankind and honey's popularity has continued throughout history. Cinnamon's essential oils and honey's enzyme that produces hydrogen peroxide qualify the two "anti-microbial" foods with the ability to help stop the growth of bacteria as well as fungi. Both are used not just as a beverage flavoring and medicine, but also as an embalming agent and are used as alternatives to traditional food preservatives due to their effective antimicrobial properties.
Also, it is worth mentioning that in Ayurvedic medicine, honey is known as 'Yogavahi', which means "the carrier of the healing values of the herbs to the cells and tissues". It is believed that when combined with another substance (eg a herb or spice) in a formulation, the special quality of honey enhances the medicinal qualities of that formulation and helps them reach the deeper tissues in the body more effectively. And honey and cinnamon, which is one of the best-known mixtures, has been reported to be a natural cure for many diseases and a formula for many health benefits:
1) HEART DISEASES: Apply honey and cinnamon powder on bread instead of using jam or butter and eat it regularly for breakfast.
2) ARTHRITIS: Apply a paste made of the two ingredients on the affected part of the body and massage slowly.
3) HAIR LOSS: Apply a paste of hot olive oil, a tablespoon of honey, a teaspoon of cinnamon powder before bath, leave it for 15 min and wash.
4) BLADDER INFECTIONS: Mix cinnamon powder and honey in a glass of lukewarm water and drink.
5) TOOTHACHE: Apply a paste of cinnamon powder and honey and on the aching tooth.
6) CHOLESTEROL: Add honey to cinnamon powder mixed in boiled water or green tea and drink.
7) COLDS: Make a glass of lukewarm honey water mixed with cinnamon powder to help boost your immune system during the cold season. It may also help to clear your sinuses.
8) INDIGESTION: Cinnamon powder sprinkled on a spoonful of honey taken before food relieves acidity.
9) LONGEVITY: Regularly take tea made with honey and a little cinnamon powder.
10) PIMPLES: Mix honey with cinnamon powder and apply paste on the pimples before sleeping and wash away the next morning.
11) OBESITY: To reduce weight, daily drink a mixture of a teaspoon of honey with half a teaspoon of cinnamon powder boiled in water with an empty stomach in the morning about half an hour before breakfast. Read: Cinnamon and Honey Recipe.
Cinnamon has an insulin boosting property (water soluble compounds called polyphenol type A polymers) which have the ability to boost insulin activity about 20 fold and can benefit people who have high sugar levels (obese people, pre-diabetics and diabetics). Also, read the honey hibernation diet theory to find out how honey contributes to the metabolizing of undesirable cholesterol and fatty acid, provides a fuelling mechanism for the body, keep blood sugar levels balanced, and let our recovery hormones get on with burning body fat stores.
12) BAD BREATH: Gargle with honey and cinnamon powder mixed in hot water so that breath stays fresh throughout the day.
Courtesy BuzzStop #119
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
Indian Summer
Visited colony today on this 76 degree day. Looking good and certainly had good energy as they swarmed me without smoking them as I opened the top lid. Supplemented their honey with sugar water. Looks like weather will be changing. Could be awhile until the next time I open the supers.
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Winter Ready
Wrapped the colony last weekend before the cold spell. Used Tyvek because I couldn't find my tar paper that I thought I had. Oh, and got my first sting. It only took 7 months. Surprised that one got me through my jeans, but I was bending down and they were taught on my thigh. Also added a top spacer board so when I need to add supplemental sugar I could without an extra larger space of another super.
Monday, October 15, 2012
Starting to wind down
Visited a few days ago. Removed most of honey frames in honey super and placed first bag of sugar in for fall food. Today and tomorrow in high 70's.
Saturday, September 29, 2012
The Waggle Dance
So-called "lower" organisms often show sophisticated learning abilities when it aids their survival and reproduction. Bees and their relatives are especially good at learning the location and appearance of flowers. What is the waggle dance of the bee? Bees communicate location information to their fellows with the famous waggle dance first described by Von Frisch in 1974.
A bee returning to its hive, if it has found flowers, makes a distinctive wiggle of the abdomen and dances up the side of the honeycomb. The bee's angle from the vertical indicates the angle of the flower away from the sun. A dance 100 degrees to the left of the 12 o'clock position indicates flowers can be found 100 degrees to the left of the sun, as seen from the hive. If the food is found by flying away from the sun, the bee dances downward rather than upward. The duration of the dance tells other bees the distance of the pollen source—a fast dance indicates food close by.
Von Frisch also identified other factors that aid bee navigation, such as odor particles borne by the foraging bee that returns to the hive. Von Frisch won a Nobel Prize for his work, but many scientists challenged it in various ways. Some suggested that bees responded to sounds rather than the dance, although other researchers believed bees were deaf. Some suggested that bees used odor alone to direct their hive mates, and the waggle dance was irrelevant. These controversies were seemingly put to rest by detailed research carried out by the team of Wolfgang H. Kirchner, of the University of Wurzburg in Germany, and William F. Towne, of the Kutztown University in Pennsylvania. They devised robot bees that delivered messages using waggle dances, or by delivering samples of pollen, or by producing a vibrating sound similar to the beating of wings. Among other things, Kirchner and Towne discovered the following:
1. Bees can indeed hear, "and their ears are well suited for detecting the sounds associated with the dances."
2. "Both sound and dance are needed to communicate information about the location and the food." A bee with clipped wings, which raised the frequency of the sound produced by the dancer, could not recruit other bees.
3. Bees in the audience of the hive may rub their thoraxes against the comb, producing a squeak that vibrates the comb. This causes the dancing bee to stop the dance and dole out samples of food, "so that her audience knows not only the direction and distance to the feeding site but how the food smells and tastes as well."
4. A robot bee, dabbed with a faint floral fragrance and "waggled" by a step motor, successfully guides bees to a sugar solution placed in a distant field.
In 1986 it was discovered that bees form detailed cognitive maps. They optimize their routes to flower locations, taking the shortest route when visiting multiple sites. Bees refuse to respond to a waggle dance that points to the middle of a lake. However, they respond to a waggle dance that points to the opposite shore of a lake.
Does it sound unrealistic to suggest that pictures and maps could be preserved in the tiny heads of insects? The bee brain is tiny compared to a human brain, but it is nevertheless a complex system with over 200,000 different nerve cells.
A bee returning to its hive, if it has found flowers, makes a distinctive wiggle of the abdomen and dances up the side of the honeycomb. The bee's angle from the vertical indicates the angle of the flower away from the sun. A dance 100 degrees to the left of the 12 o'clock position indicates flowers can be found 100 degrees to the left of the sun, as seen from the hive. If the food is found by flying away from the sun, the bee dances downward rather than upward. The duration of the dance tells other bees the distance of the pollen source—a fast dance indicates food close by.
Von Frisch also identified other factors that aid bee navigation, such as odor particles borne by the foraging bee that returns to the hive. Von Frisch won a Nobel Prize for his work, but many scientists challenged it in various ways. Some suggested that bees responded to sounds rather than the dance, although other researchers believed bees were deaf. Some suggested that bees used odor alone to direct their hive mates, and the waggle dance was irrelevant. These controversies were seemingly put to rest by detailed research carried out by the team of Wolfgang H. Kirchner, of the University of Wurzburg in Germany, and William F. Towne, of the Kutztown University in Pennsylvania. They devised robot bees that delivered messages using waggle dances, or by delivering samples of pollen, or by producing a vibrating sound similar to the beating of wings. Among other things, Kirchner and Towne discovered the following:
1. Bees can indeed hear, "and their ears are well suited for detecting the sounds associated with the dances."
2. "Both sound and dance are needed to communicate information about the location and the food." A bee with clipped wings, which raised the frequency of the sound produced by the dancer, could not recruit other bees.
3. Bees in the audience of the hive may rub their thoraxes against the comb, producing a squeak that vibrates the comb. This causes the dancing bee to stop the dance and dole out samples of food, "so that her audience knows not only the direction and distance to the feeding site but how the food smells and tastes as well."
4. A robot bee, dabbed with a faint floral fragrance and "waggled" by a step motor, successfully guides bees to a sugar solution placed in a distant field.
In 1986 it was discovered that bees form detailed cognitive maps. They optimize their routes to flower locations, taking the shortest route when visiting multiple sites. Bees refuse to respond to a waggle dance that points to the middle of a lake. However, they respond to a waggle dance that points to the opposite shore of a lake.
Does it sound unrealistic to suggest that pictures and maps could be preserved in the tiny heads of insects? The bee brain is tiny compared to a human brain, but it is nevertheless a complex system with over 200,000 different nerve cells.
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