Forums Forums General Forums A - Z Leisure & Hobbies Bees

The eternal Geekus just can't behave. Thanks for the website, I will have a look at that later and get actioned.
The Bee movie is really good but have onlyseen it once.

There are loads of flowering plants shown on that website. Many could go in tubs or window boxes. Ideal project for the kiddies.

I note with interest that it is only the females that sting!

Same with mosquitoes, only the females bite. Nuff said....

Bumble bees are great things. The last thing they want to do is to sting you, as it will be THE last thing they ever do - as Granny rightly said! They only have one shot in their armoury and they don't want to waste it!

If a bumble bee alights on you, enjoy the superb beauty of it. Don't panic, it means you no harm. I have even gently stroked one when it was on my bare arm. No problem. They are wonderful creatures.

Wasps however (IMHO) are pure evil. The only good wasp is a very flat one!! (Waits for tirade of abuse from the Wirral Wasp Huggers Association!)

Sorry, this computer keeps crashing.Driving me mental.

Yes, I read that about the female bees the other night. They are very interesting....I keep saying that don't I?...but they are.
It must always be the female mosquitoes that find their way into our bedrooms, in that case.
I've got a foxes den in my garden too. It's been there a few years now. Last year I spotted 2 cubs coming out to play just before dusk. They, in return spotted me and shot back into the den.Quite often the vixen is out during the day. I wonder if it's the same parent or if they move on and leave it to the next generation. They don't half make a racket when they are looking for their mate around January.
Anyway, back to the bees. Wouldn't it be nice if Wirral could be the best bee place in the uk?

This is copied from the Cheshire BKA site which Geekus posted. Makes the answer to original question all clear.
..............
Bumble bees are not aggressive and if left alone will gladly keep flying to and fro from their nest. They do a lot of good work pollinating.

Once established they cannot be moved and we recommend that the nest be left as it will die out in the Autumn as bumble bees work on an annual cycle. A queen that has over wintered by hibernating finds a suitable nest site in late February/early March. The queen rears the first offspring, which are workers, whose duty is to forage and care for the colony. The queen continues to lay eggs and the colony develops during the year with the bees doing a lot of good pollinating fruit crops etc. New queens are produced in late July/August, these mate with the males or drones and find somewhere to hibernate over the winter and those that survive the winter start the nests the following year. The original nest dies out at the end of the season.

My son just came to visit and has been working in Wirral today. He said there were loads of bees either dead or dying, all over the place.

Has anyone else seen this ?

No

There were loads of them at the festival gardens on Sunday.

Oh well, his brain must have been buzzing.

Good thing if they were plentiful Rude. Only found out a couple of weeks ago, that they live for about 3 weeks, the worker bee collects 1/10 of a teaspoon of honey in it's life. For one pound of honey, as a hive they cover over 55,000 miles.

Another of God's wonderful little creatures

Wow....just Wow We're waiting for Friends of the Earth to contact us re. free wild flower seeds that Bees like. They took our Donation (via text) quick enough....lol

I planted a lot of bee friendly plants amongst my fruit bushes last year.They have come back this year and there are loads of bees in the garden.Nothing like sitting in the garden on a summer evening listening to the bees buzzing about.

Really feels good don't you think, helping such little creatures to survive.

Let's know what seeds you get Rude.

Devilwoman, what plants have you got? They seem to love the blue and yellow plants in my garden. ALso the wisteria and the deutzia which are both white, one of which is heavily perfumed. Foxgloves are another, but they seem to go for the blue more.

This was on Business Insider Australia 2013.

Join Log In

Tech
Money & Markets
Briefing
Ideas
Executive Life

BRIEFING
A Devastating Look At Our World If Honeybees Disappeared
DINA SPECTOR JUN 22 2013, 10:38 PM BOOKMARK 45
Dead almond trees
A world without honeybees would also mean a world without fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds.
Nearly one-third of the world’s crops are dependent on honeybees for pollination, but over the last decade the black-and-yellow insects have been dying at unprecedented rates both in the United States and abroad.

Pesticides, disease, parasites, poor weather, and the stress of being trucked from orchard-to-orchard to pollinate different crops all play a role in the decline of managed honeybee populations. A lack of bees threatens farmers who depend on these nectar- and pollen-eating animals for their pollination services.

We have few planned defenses against a honeybee disaster. The Farm Bill, passed on June 10, 2013, allocates less than $2 million a year in emergency assistance to honeybees.

“The bottom line is, if something is not done to improve honeybee health, then most of the interesting food we eat is going to be unavailable,” warns Carlen Jupe, secretary and treasurer for the California State Beekeepers Association.

Honeybees as a species are not in danger of extinction, but their ability to support the industry of commercial pollination, and by extension, a large portion of our food supply, is in serious danger.

Whole Foods recently imagined what our grocery store would like in a world without bees by removing more than half of the market’s produce. Here, we also take a purely hypothetical look at how the human diet and lifestyle would change if honeybees and other bee pollinators disappeared from our planet one day. This is the worst case scenario — it’s possible that human ingenuity and alternate pollinators can mitigate some of these outcomes, but not necessarily all of them.

If bees dies, beekeepers who make their living by managing bee colonies will go out of business.