In beekeeping, as in any other business, there is professional slang.
These are not obscene, but far from literary words, so you will definitely not find them in the dictionary. However, beekeepers actively use them to explain a particular situation.
In general, I have compiled for you a list of the most common words and phrases that can be heard in the apiary or with a glass of beer with the beekeeper.
Layering. As you know, in the wild, bees breed in swarms. But swarming is an unpredictable phenomenon, and most often unplanned. When the beekeeper needs to multiply his apiary and increase the number of bee colonies, he makes layering.
Baby So beekeepers kindly call the bee brood of the young generation.
Standing or lying eggs. As you know, the queen bee lays eggs in the cells. The first day, the egg stands vertically in the cell, this egg is called standing. On the second day, the egg bends about 45 degrees. On the third day, the egg lies down and is called a recumbent.
Humpback brood. One would like to recall the words of Vysotsky "I said Brokeback." But the beekeeping concept “hunchbacked” has nothing to do with the famous movie. We have the so-called brood, which was postponed by the uterus tinder or bees tinder. I’ll talk about this in more detail below ...
Closed brood. On day 9, the bees seal the cell. From this day, brood is considered closed. On day 21 (if you count from the egg), a young bee leaves.
Open brood- the same brood, but until 9 days when it is in the open phase.
The family erupted. A family can release one swarm and calm down. But it happens that behind the first swarm comes the second, third, and so on until 8. (I talked about this earlier)
So, when the family released a large number of swarms, a small group of bees and a young infertile uterus remain in the former large family. To such families and as applied to the word - erupted.
Looking at a branch - a comic phrase, hinting that the family may soon release a swarm.
Landfill swarm. It happens that at the same time several swarms come from different families at once. Initially, one sits on a branch, then another swarm sits on it and so on until five. They literally fall on top of each other. It turns out just a huge swarm, the weight of which sometimes reaches 15 kg.
Bribe - when honey plants begin to actively release nectar.
Pulling a wax. Bees are able to build a honeycomb literally from scratch. But to accelerate this process, and in order to set the right direction for this construction, the beekeeper uses wax. This is a thin wax plate with the bottoms of the cells in the ornament. The bees can only build the walls.
Beard. When the street is too hot and the ventilation in the hive itself is not enough, a certain group of bees hangs under the arrival board and resembles a beard in some way.
Uterus tinder. Sperm in the sperm-receiver of the uterus lasts for about 5 years. But due to illness or due to the fact that the uterus is poorly inseminated, it stops sowing fertilized eggs, and sows only the eggs, which do not need fertilization.
She does it in decent cells.But since the mass of the drone is greater than the mass of the bee, it simply does not fit physically in such a cell. Then the bees have to increase the height of this cell. It looks like a lot of small humps on a flat surface.
Is it helpful? Some of this has been heard from familiar beekeepers.
In fact, there are many more concepts that I want to talk about. Therefore, in order not to bore you with all the definitions, I will continue my story in the next article.
