@lukeharby I am the only other person you have met that does.

A TERRIBLE thing has happened. My 9-yr old daughter has decided she likes Marmite. (retches behind a bin)

@Taz Sunday 6th Feb 2051 13:42

@Squish oh dear not nice. Comparable to the Covid vacc? That always knocks me sideways for a day.

Next morning update: my arm really hurts at the injection site. Like Mike Tyson gave me a dead arm.

@phillipcairns I think sadly the catkins go unforaged (not that the hazel minds as the catkins are wind-pollinated). The weather has been too cold and/or rainy for any bees to venture out of the tight huddle. I keep checking all the hazels but yet to see a single bee on a catkin.

Hello ... congratulations on finding me. This is the new Mastodon account for The Apiarist, a weekly blog on bees and beekeeping, with an emphasis on the science of sustainable beekeeping.

How not to lose your bees in the first place (swarm control, disease control etc.) and how to get more bees (queen rearing and good colony management).

New posts appear on Fridays and will be 'advertised' here.

Happy beekeeping 🐝

Bee venom immunotherapy update: today was the last of the 8 weekly sessions of up-dosing at Addenbrookes’ specialist immunotherapy clinic. I’m now having an amount of bee venom equivalent to 2 stings’ worth injected. A 4-week break now and then additional doses of this amount every 10 weeks for the next 3 years! They also took a blood test today to compare my reaction to today’s venom with the blood test taken at the start of the course. #honeybees #allergy #venom #immunotherapy

A quick temporary fix comes in the form of some leftover damp proof membrane (DPM) from a building project. Wrapped around the hive, it prevents the woodpecker from gaining purchase on the sides, so it no longer attacks them.

We visited our woodland apiary this week to check on fondant levels etc and discovered a couple of hives had been attacked by a woodpecker! Some serious weaponry on those guys! Green woodpeckers normally eat ants but when the ground is frozen will attempt to find bee nests in trees (or man-made ones!), quickly knock holes in them and eat the bees and honey inside. Without a fix, surviving bees can easily freeze to death as the colony can no longer regulate hive temperature. #bees #woodpecker

𝗠𝘂𝘀𝗵𝗿𝗼𝗼𝗺 𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗸𝗮𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗶𝗱𝗲𝘀 𝗮 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝘀𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗼 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗰 𝘄𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-20/mushroom-packaging-solution-to-plastic-waste-problem/101873116

A start-up packaging company combines fungi with organic waste to grow and create compostable packaging.

Organic waste and mycelium is grown for 7 days in a mold and the final product is able to be used in place of traditional materials such as polystyrene.

After use, the packaging can be composted in the garden.

Let's do this now! 🍄

#Fungi #Recycle #Plastc #Mycology #Mushrooms

Greetings. I wish I'd gotten a screenshot of this one, but I saw a registration form today that was one of the worst examples of "password hell" I've ever seen. I think it had about 10 lines of requirements, stuff like:

Must be 9 to 14 characters.
Must include both lower and uppercase alphabetics.
Must include numbers.
Must include special characters.
Can't have more than three alphabetics in a row.
Can't have more than three numbers in a row.
Can't have more than three special characters in a row.
... and so on.

OH, and of course, copy/paste was disabled for both username and password, so this all had to be hand typed TWICE for confirmation. AND ... the typed password was obscured with no way to choose to display it.

And you wonder why the Galactic Federation has quarantined this planet.

Best, -L

@Wild one of these fellas? Either way that is an extraordinary story.

@lukeharby that’s the badger! Cept mine only had one eye. Presumably the other was resting or had been ripped off by a stupid shark or something. It was big, too. Deffo a two-hander if you needed to wield it in battle.

@lukeharby conch. When I was about 9 or 10 my dad had a friend who moved out to the British Virgin Islands and invited my family out for a holiday there. It was beautiful. The seas were crystal clear and the sand was white. One day I was snorkelling about 10m from the beach and found a live conch on the seabed with its one massive eye looking at me. Utterly enchanted, I picked it up and took it back with me. I put it in my rucksack. A few days later we flew home…

@lukeharby …and the smell on the plane was so bad it was making people violently sick in the cabin (6 hour flight), but no one could figure out where it was coming from, and being 9, I hadn’t made the connection that it was my beach treasure nicely rotting away in my rucksack. It was only when we got home after a very uncomfortable journey that my parents angrily discovered the rapidly liquefying source. It remains a family joke to this day, and they still have the conch. #conch

If you fuck up a plumbing project on the weekend you should get a second weekend as a consolation prize.

We keep this up in our kitchen because you never know when you’ll need it

@Squish darn tootin it is! 😁 now just need to dig some holes.

Our local beekeeping association (bka) very kindly arranged with the Woodland Trust to give us a load of free bee-friendly tree saplings, so went down to pick up 15 new trees today - wild cherry, hazel, silver birch. The 2 latter provide essential early Spring forage for bees, so should be beneficial early next year. Apparently the next load of free trees will include Sweet Chestnut and Lime, both of which are fab sources of Summer main runny honey harvest! #bees #woodlandTrust #beekeeping