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The Backyard Bee Team on This Way Up
- Part 1 of 2
- Next Part: More about bees & honey
After all the fun we had setting up the Funky Chicken Farm we're expanding the This Way Up Suburban Home Food Production Initiative (or TWUSHFPI for short). Over the next few months we're buzzing around in my backyard with the bee team.
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Bees 1: Meet the beekeeper
8 Nov 2008Meet our bee team for the first time, and This Way Up's bee mentor David Carleton visits Simon's place for a site inspection. Audio
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Bees 2: Hive Location
1 Nov 2008We're setting up a bee hive next to the Funky Chicken Farm. The plan's to get that honey flowing while at the same time spreading the love and getting a bit of pollination happening in the 'hood. Audio
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Bees 3: Catching a Swarm
15 Nov 2008We recruit a swarm of 10,000 bees to join my back-yard bee hive. Audio
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Bees 4: Building a Hive
22 Nov 2008There's nowhere for the backyard bees to stay yet so we heat up some wax to build a hive for them. Audio
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Bees 5: Moving into the Hive
29 Nov 2008The big day when the bees arrive at my place. The hives are painted, we've waxed the plastic frames where the bees will start to build comb. For most new beekeepers this is how you'd get your first… Audio
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Bees 6: Merging the Swarm
6 Dec 2008Frank Lindsay, who's a commercial beekeeper, drops round with the swarm he's been looking after and gets me to open my hive and merge the two colonies. The reason for merging the two colonies is to… Audio
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Bees 7: Check-up
13 Dec 2008David Carleton and I are opening up the hive to check that our queen is alive and well and see how the bees are getting on with producing honey. Audio
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Bees 8: pre-Christmas visit
20 Dec 2008The Backyard Bee team checks in with the hive before the Christmas break. I find out what my 50,000 bees will need over the holidays. Audio
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Bees 9: Trouble in the Hive
31 Jan 2009The queen bee's gone AWOL and taken thousands of workers with her! I got back for a relaxing few weeks away and checked the hive, sadly there were hardly any bees and no fresh eggs or larvae. It looks… Audio
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Bees 10: New Queen
7 Feb 2009We're having some issues in the hive, getting through more queens than Henry VIII! But we do have a new queen and she’s laying a nice pattern. Audio
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Bees 11: Colony Collapse Disorder
14 Feb 2009Rowan Jacobsen on colony collapse disorder. It's killing billions of the world's honeybees but nobody really knows why. Audio
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Bees 12: Toxic Tutu
21 Feb 2009Toxic honey's been in the news recently. The culprit's tutin, a toxin that gets produced when bees gather honeydew from the sap-sucking vine hopper insect on tutu bushes. So if you're a backyard… Audio
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Bees 13: Hive Check
28 Feb 2009After recent disasters affecting the backyard bee team are we ever going to get any honey? Audio
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Bees 14: Honey Extraction
14 Mar 2009We drop in on commercial beekeeper Frank Lindsay to see how honey gets extracted from the hive. Audio
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Bees 15: A Taste of Honey
28 Mar 2009Pro Maureen Maxwell pro shows me how to tell my mono-florals from my blends. She tastes honey for a living. Audio
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Bees 16: Varroa Treatment
18 Apr 2009Bee mentor David Carleton sorts out the hive for winter. Audio
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Bees 17: Expansion
23 Oct 2010The Backyard Bee Team goes into expansion mode. After a bumper honey harvest last year, bee mentor David Carleton helps us move in a new hive. Audio
Links
- Bee gallery
- Gallery: NZ A-Z: beekeeping
- Video: Commercial Honey Extraction
- Honey harvest gallery
- Honey recipes
- More about bees & honey
External Links
- Video: varroa and bee lifecycle
- Managing tutin contaminations in honey - Food Safety
- National Beekeepers' Association of NZ
- Managing tutin contaminations in honey - Food Safety
- Bees & Honey - Ministry for Agriculture and Forestry
- Beekeeping on Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand