A light hearted guide to beekeeping and bee products

Here you can find out :

About bee products

What beekeepers do

What Apidologists do

The Cape honeybee curiosity

What do Apidologists do?

Apidologists do research and development work to help the bees make more honey. This helps the beekeepers as they can then charge more rent!

Apidologists can use special techniques to produce new queens.

Paul Collett, a Rhodes University student working at Makana Meadery as an apidologist, grafted worker eggs from worker cells into queen cells. This tricked the bees into turning the worker eggs into new queens.

Our trusty apidologist, now finished grafting displays his specially made queen cell cups into which he has placed the worker eggs.

A true apidologist has no fear of bees. Here, Paul inserts queen cells into a specially arranged beehive to develop the eggs into young queens.

A week later Paul holds up a few of the queen cells - inside each one of these peanut sized cells is a queen who will hatch and lay thousands of eggs every day when placed into a new hive.

Makana Meadery is grateful for the queen rearing advice given by Dr Mike Allsop of the Plant Protection Research Institute, Stellenbosch.

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