There’s so much to tell that we can’t fit it all in so I’ll just relate a few incidents from our adventure. Not all of this entry is Bee related but I hope interesting none the less.
Apis cerana - the differences from A. melifera:-
Much smaller I estimate about10mm in length, this is pretty rough.
“Bee space” required is around 4mm. (Estimated from the design of the hives we’ve seen).
Cells are
The bees do not seem to produce propolis. I’ve noticed some hives have swiveling pieces of wood to hold brood and super boxes in the same alignment and only one used a hive tool.
The bees are much more lively and enter the hive much more quickly.
They produce about 12 kg of honey a year, (info from several Beekeepers).
They have less hair on the abdomen and are quite brightly coloured with yellow stripes reminiscent of a wasp, see the “Pictures from Nepal
The bees are far less aggressive, out of the four or five inspections we’ve witnessed only one beekeeper wore a veil when opening a hive and neither did we. Colin was stung and reports that the cerana sting is far less painful than that of our European bee.
Colin and I have observed that there don’t seem to be any guard bees at the entrance to the hive.
The Queen is all black and thus fairly easily spotted, I was lucky enough to capture a Queen in a photograph of a frame being shown to us by a Nepalese Beekeeper and the picture is on the “Pictures from Nepal
The bees we are told are more likely to abscond or swarm and one Beekeeper told us that he’d had one colony abscond or swarm 6 times, (his English was much better than my Nepalese but still poor so I couldn’t establish exactly whether he was saying they absconded or swarmed), other Beekeepers said they expected the bees to swarm once or twice in a year. Perhaps there are good and bad strains of A.cerana.
The standard hive is much smaller than hives used for melifera, the brood frame is 12” x 7 ½” compared to 14” x 8 ½” for a national (the most popular hive in the UK
The gun.
A farmer in the “Hilly side”, which is what the Nepalese call the very extensive Himalayan foot hills, gave us a demonstration of the use of a muzzle loading gun. He had made the powder and bullets himself and the gun was hand made. He rammed a quantity of gun powder down the barrel, the measurement seemed a bit hit and miss, then a wad of paper on top of the powder before sliding the bullet down the barrel with a final wad to hold the bullet in place. The ignition was accomplished by a “cap of the type used in toy guns secured with polythene over the firing hole. He then fitted a wedge of wood between the firing hammer and the cap, holding the gun at half cock before setting up a 2” thick plank with a target roughly drawn on it about 10 metres away. I didn’t see him pull the trigger as I was half cowering , half sheltering a very nervous child. The gun went off with a tremendous bang and the bullet went right through the target just inside the bull!
He also had a beautifully made bow constructed entirely of bamboo including the string. More surprising to me than the structure was that the missile was not an arrow but a stone! He was also deadly accurate with it, at around 10 metres.
The bus ride.
We’ve undertaken several bus trips but the one from Chainpur to the Saba Khola was the most exciting. The driver clearly loved his job and exhibited skills that would qualify him for the job of stunt –driver in a James Bond film. There were huge rocks in the road which had come crashing down the mountain in the recent past, sections of the road where the tarmac surface was missing and deep ruts had developed, some of which at a conservative estimate were 3’ deep, and occasionally another bus or lorry would squeeze past, at places where the road was wide enough, with only inches to spare. Despite the condition of the road the driver swung his bus around hair-pin bends and other obstacles with great panache and at what seemed to me tremendous speed. For much of the ride we seemed to be a couple of feet away from the edge of the road beyond which was nothing but fresh air until you reached the valley floor sometimes thousands of feet below. Combine this with the fact that at times the road condition caused the bus to sway alarmingly and you get some idea of what we experienced. The Nepalese passengers thought the OMG expression on my face and my mime of a palpitating heart hilarious. I fancy the Nepalese would find Thorpe Park
The next entry will I hope be from Kathmandu where we intend to visit an organization called “Himalayan Beekeeping”. I’m not sure but I believe they were established to promote Beekeeping in Nepal
Goodbye for now, more later
Colin and Barry
