CATDOLL : CATDOLL: The best way to protect bees?

The best way to protect bees?

Just like humans, bees can get sick and face life-threatening situations. According to data, a large number of bees die from diseases every year. To this end, experts and scholars have conducted detailed research on the diseases that bees may be infected with in order to protect them, and have summarized corresponding solutions.

The implementation of these methods has greatly reduced the mortality rate of bees. We all know that bees need to collect pollen to make honey, so pesticides left on flowers and plants will also become a potential threat to bees. Therefore, in the process of cultivating plants, we should try to reduce the use of various chemical fertilizers and use more clean and pollution-free fertilizers to minimize the harm to bees and allow them to collect honey freely.

In addition, bees also have their own natural enemies, and ants are one of them. Ants will crawl into the beehive in groups to steal honey and pollen, and sometimes attack bees, disrupting their normal lives. There is also an insect called a bee-eater, which is named because of its preference for eating bees.

The latest technology in beekeeping?

1. Live frame beekeeping

The honeycombs in the movable frame beehive are movable and can be exchanged with other bee colonies; the movable frame beehive can freely control the colony strength according to needs; and the movable frame beehive can cause almost zero harm to the bee colony when extracting honey. Therefore, it is recommended to use flexible and easy-to-manage movable frame beehives for beekeeping as much as possible.

2. Proper bee breeding

Honey bees have two most critical breeding periods: spring and autumn. The purpose of spring breeding is to quickly restore the colony's strength so that it can make the most of the abundant nectar resources in spring, while the purpose of autumn breeding is to encourage the colony to quickly cultivate a large number of overwintering bees of the right age so that the colony can survive the winter smoothly. In fact, both spring and autumn breeding are inseparable from reward feeding. The specific method is to feed the colony a small amount of honey water or syrup every night during the rapid breeding period of honey bees.

3. Breeding Queen Bee

The quality of a bee colony depends to a large extent on the quality of its queen bee. Experienced beekeepers are willing to spend time and energy on breeding queen bees. Currently, the most widely used artificial queen breeding technique is queen transferring. The specific operation is to first use a queen breeding stick to make a base out of beeswax, and then place the base into the bee colony for transformation. After the base is made, use a worm transferring needle to move in 1-2 day old worker bee larvae. Finally, the queen cells with larvae are introduced into the queen breeding colony to be fed by worker bees.

4. Artificial swarming

Swarming is the main way for bees to expand their population size. There are two swarming methods: natural swarming and artificial swarming. Natural swarming is to wait for the bee colony to swarm on its own and then collect the swarms, while artificial swarming can divide the bee colony into two or more according to the beekeeper's wishes. In fact, experienced beekeepers often perform artificial swarming because natural swarming of bee colonies is almost uncontrollable, and if the swarms are not collected in time, they are very likely to be lost.

5. Strictly prevent diseases

Disease prevention and control is the difficulty and key point in bee breeding. Once a disease breaks out, it can easily destroy even a large-scale apiary. The main diseases include foulbrood and sacbrood. The main parasites include bee mites (mainly harm Italian honey bees) and nest moths (mainly harm Chinese honey bees). The main enemies include wasps, spiders, ants, etc. Therefore, beekeepers must actively do a good job in disease prevention, and if the bee colony has already been diseased, it must be dealt with in a timely manner.