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...

I have managed to eliminate many bits of plastic in our house over the years. I take my own shopping bags to the supermarket. I use glass jars for storing things. I buy wooden toys for kids. I have even fixed my washing baskets rather than buy a new one! But one of the few things that I find hard to live without is cling wrap - that soft stretchy plastic that covers up food in the fridge and makes traveling with food so much easier. A few weeks ago at the markets, I saw some beeswax material that can be used to replace clingwrap in a lot of applications. I knew I could make it and so turned to other bloggers to see how they did it. Easy to do. Hard to stuff up. And it works, really works! Here's what I did... First cut up some plain cotton material into useful sizes. I was going to hem them but as it turns out - the wax holds the threads in place so I didn't need to.   Preheat the oven to a fairly low heat. Beeswax is flammable so go slow and sure rathe...

We have four hives of native bees in our back yard. They make the greatest pets and ensure you always win that icebreaker question at workshops when they ask you to "share how many legs at your place" (you know, two for each person, two for the budgie, none for the goldfish and four each for the cat and dog). With four hives with 2000 bees in each with six legs each - I don't know the exact figure but no one ever comes close!! In the last couple of weeks we have noticed a small colony of bees forming beside the nest. They didn't go back in at night and didn't fly off. You can see them on the mirror and up in the corner. We made them a "bridge so they could walk back to the hive and they simply wouldn't. We took the mirror away as we thought that might be confusing them but it didn't change anything... In the end we contacted  bee guru, Russel Zabel and Here's what he told us... The hive has produced to many drones. Drones ...

There are about 1500 species of native bees here in Australia. Only four of them (that I know about) swarm and build community hives. The other are all solitary and mate and lay eggs without hanging out with 10,000 of their buddies! (I've put some links at the bottom of the page to interesting bee sites if you are keen to learn more!) With a new species native bee species recently being identified, the powers that be(e) have changed the formal name to Tetragonula (Tetra meaning four species) from Trigonia (Tri meaning three) followed by the species name but lots of backyarders are yet to change their vocabulary!  Summer is the season to split Australian Native bee hives. We swapped a hive of Trigona Carbonarii with friends for a hive of Trigonia Hockingsii last year when we both split hives. (See Carbonarii split here ). It's been a year since we got the Hockingsii and the husband has been reading up on them and busy building new hives in the background in prepar...

We have a couple a native bee hives in the back yard and in the winter its a good idea to give them a bit of extra insulation. From the bee's perspective, they don't have to waste valuable energy or resources keeping the hive warm if you help them out during the colder months. We subscribe to the Zabel's newsletter (Brisbane and possibly Australia's leading bee sellers) and a couple of weeks ago they sent out a newsletter advising us that it was time to insulate your hive if they are in exposed area's. Here's what I did... This is our Trigona Carbonari hive set up for summer. We have a tropical lid on it, designed to keep the hive a little cooler in the hot Queensland summers. Last year we got a polystyrene vege box and cut it down so that the back half slides onto the hive.  As it wasn't the perfect fit, we used a panel to slide into the side (see it pulled down on the left hand side of the hive in this photo?) so that the box fits more ...