We have been keeping Australian Native bees for about six of seven or years now and have ended up with quite a few hives... we think we have 16 or so at the moment. We have the very social and easily domesticated Carbonarii and Hockingsii and just recently acquired an Autralis hive as well! There are 1700 odd Australian Native bee species but most of them are solitary. The hatch, eat, pupate, find a mate, lay eggs and die without hanging out with any other of their bee friends. As I said, solitary bees! There are (I think) five species of social native bee in Australia and they are all tropical bees. The keepers spend a lot of energy keeping the hives cool in the Summer and so the standard hive is painted white to reflect the heat, especially if the hive is kept in the full sun. Now this works really well if you are living in the tropics and if your hives are in the sun. We recently moved to the Gold Coast Hinterland and its decidedly cooler here! The hives are only in the sun fo...

We had a spare hive last year and decided to give eduction a go after a visit from Nick Powell who came to have a look at our experimental Hockingsii hive - the FROTH. The eduction method of creating a new hive takes a little while, in our case about nine months before we were confidant that it was full enough to split, had a few queen cells and could survive on its own. A normal split take about 10 minutes but, depending on your personal views, can be a bit hard on the bees. As an experiment, we were happy with eduction and will probably do a combination of eduction and physical splits next year. We like our bees and have trouble with wholesale destruction when we do a physical split, so our thinking at the moment is that depending on the site of the hive, we will educt those that can have another hive easily attached and split those in an "un-eductable" place! When you split the parent hive from the educted hive, the main issue is what to do with the split hive and ho...

While walking the dog down at the dam a few months ago I saw all these insects, that I thought were possibly bees, clambering all over a couple of stems of grass. I had nothing to capture images of this spectacle with me except my phone (and that couldn't focus on small insects on grasses that were waving in the wind!) so a week or so ago when I saw it again and had my camera on me, I took a few million photos and bought them home hoping to identify them. I decided they were bees - they looked like a blue banded bee but different... I ended up sending a few pictures to Nick at Australian Native Bees  and asking him what he A. thought they were and B. what he thought they were doing! He said they were likely to be drones waiting for the mating flight of a queen in a nest somewhere - sort of a bee bucks party!    He mailed me back a few hours later and said that a bee mate of his had identified them as Green and Gold Nomia's...

We have been playing with native bees for a while now and have both Tetragonula Hockingsii and Tetragonula Carbonarii. Our Carbonarii are housed in a standard OATH hive (Original Australian Tetragonula Hive) which are now an industry standard - and our Hockingsii bees were housed in the Felhaber hive (named after the inventor, Les Felhaber). However, my husband decided that the long hives had some real complications, one of them being how to put them out in the garden and keep them stable and so he played around with a design and he came up with the FROTH  (Froggy's 'Riginal Other Type Hive) hive design. We did a transfer into this new design from a traditional Felhaber last year (link here) and this year it seemed full and so we decided to have a go at splitting it. Nick from Australian Native Bees came to have a look and give us a hand. Here's what we did... This is an empty FROTH design Hockingsii hive. It has the same split design as the ...

We generally split our hives from October until Christmas in order to create more hives and collect the honey. One of our hives died during the winter this year. It seemed to have had some predator get in and destroy the hive from the inside. We cleaned it out and then popped it in the freezer for three weeks to kill any eggs or bugs that might be still living in corners. It was the wrong time for splitting a hive and with a spare hive we got to thinking about duplicating a hive. The top half of our original hive of native bees has been on our patio for about four years now and its the parent of many a strong hive. We have seen hive duplication in our bee books and on the net but had never tried it. And so, one sunny afternoon - we decided to try it... Here's what we did... The original hive has sat on a north facing shelf under the eaves of the patio for around the four year mark. We have split it every year using the traditional method of cutting it in ...