32 : A Year on a Honey Farm: April A MONTHLY INSIGHT INTO COMMERCIAL BEEKEEPING
A Year on a Honey Farm
Duncan Simmons
just endured ten rounds with the local badger! I think I may have been awarded the fight by way of technical knockout. It all began a couple of weeks ago. I noticed a few of my overwintered mating nuclei had fallen off their stands and come apart on hitting the ground.
A
At first glance I believed it may have been a strong gust of wind that could had dislodged them. They have elastic ties on them to keep them secure, but as the mating nucleus boxes are made of light polystyrene this could have been a possibility. On closer inspection, though,
there were the finger prints (claw marks) of the suspect, whom we have now positively
s I sit down to write this article for April, I have
identified as Mr Brock, the local badger!
Now don’t get me wrong. I love wildlife – after all I am a beekeeper and have spent the past 45 years living in the countryside – but when Mr Brock decides he is going to visit my mating apiary every night for over a week and destroy in excess of a dozen mini-nucs and bees during this time, then that to me is a challenge.
Google Search
In the forty-plus years that I have been keeping bees I have never had a problem with badgers – until now. So I did what I always do when I need information on something I am unsure about and visited the Internet. I searched in Google under ‘Badger Bees Honey’.
Disturbing Results
Badgers can cause occasional difficulties for beekeepers through damage to their colonies and hives
www.bee-craft.com
The results, I have to say, were rather disturbing as most of the results that came back were for the honey badger which, by all accounts, is a formidable foe who will stop at nothing to get his snout into a hive of bees, even if it means tearing thick tin from the roof of a hive suspended from a tree some distance from the ground. If by some chance you are a lion or a hyena and you get in his way,
The badger-proof electric fence
you are likely to suffer grave consequences as a result. Luckily the honey badger is not a native species to the British Isles and we only have to deal with his not so destructive distant cousin.
Actions Taken
At first, I decided to remove the mating nuclei from the lower levels on the stands and take them to my other mating site. We had to move almost 30 boxes, but we felt sure this
would deter the badger and we would have no more of his bad behaviour. How wrong I was. Mr Brock could climb! And quite proficient he was at it too. The following nights, the nuclei on the second levels were also getting smashed and broken apart. It seemed that this was becoming a habit for him and he was returning every night to work his magic. The bees had suffered more than enough by
April 2015 Vol 97 No 4
All photos supplied by Duncan Simmons
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