What's new

This page will - in due course - carry news about bees and some less important announcements about this site. For the moment, I'll restrict it to the following ...

Emails

In the very near future, I'm going to start 'tidying' up the list of email recipients. Of those transferred to this new server, ~2% are non-existent addresses. Of the remainder, ~1000 have now received 4 emails of new posts but have not opened any of them.

All will be taken off the email recipient list, but not removed as a subscriber. I pay monthly for the emails and there seems little point in clogging the internet up with thousands more that are never opened.

Another biotech approach to tackle DWV

I've discussed this type of strategy before ... elegant science, but all sorts of regulatory and practical hurdles remain before it could be applied by beekeepers. And, I'm not sure if it needed if Varroa levels are managed properly.

Help

Raw honey?

It seems as though at least some councils will allow honey to be labelled as raw. A recent court case between Odysea, a Greek food firm, and Waltham Forest trading standards ruled in favour of Odysea (who produce honey labelled as 'raw') on appeal.

How raw is raw? Odysea warm their honey during extraction ... is 37°C allowed, but 39°C too high? This wasn't clear and the judge didn't define what the limits of raw were.

Personally, I think this is a mistake. Other perhaps than cut comb honey, I think that allowing the term raw, without defining the limits, makes the system open to abuse and disadvantages beekeepers who don't label their honey as raw, or - perhaps worse - cheats customers who think their honey (pasteurised, microfiltered etc.) is really unadulterated 'raw' honey.

A vaccine for DWV?

A recent post on the Bee-L mailing list made the following point:

Last weekend, I got an update from a representative of Dalan about a field trial of their AFB vaccination. The results were inconclusive since the test apiary was free of AFB. However, Dalan reported that the vaccinated yard had a much lower incidence of DWV titers in the sampled bees. When questioned about the results, Dalan's response was they are looking into the possibilities. Would be interesting if an AFB vaccination somehow stimulates an immune response against DWV.

I'd say it would be more than interesting ... it would be a miracle. That would be like finding the measles vaccine also protected against E. coli 0157. Other than some sort of non-specific upregulation of the immune response, I don't see this being anything other than phenomenology.

Don't hold your breath.

Buy me a coffee

You can, and I'd be very grateful. Some of the legacy pages (i.e. before the start of 2024) carry a 'Buy me a coffee button' that looks something like this:

However, using some JavaScript wizardry, I've also managed to embed a coffee widget in the bottom left-hand corner of the page. Using this means you barely need to leave the site.