Regular Readers,

will know that in Steve and Kai's back garden Steve has 3 bee hives, 

and here they are in the summer, Diana and Kai having a close look, 

Steve is opening one of the hives, 

to keep an eye on how the health of the hive is, locally Steve looks after several hive in the local bee keeping club, also if you have a swarm he is the guy that will take them away for you, as it happens I have a soft spot for bees and happened to find a article about a deadly invader, (for bees), trying to invade the UK, the Asian or Yellow Legged hornet, 

honey bees in Europe have no real defence against these invaders,

a handy guide to the European and Asian hornet, well it appears that a bee keeper in France, Frédérique Ripet has developed a answer to the problem of Asia hornets gaining access to the hive and slaughtering the inhabitants, Stop-It Max, give bees the chance to escape Asian hornets, which can ambush them as they return to the hive with pollen, “A nest of Asian hornets eats 12kg of insects a year,” Frédérique Ripet told The Connexion.“When they can find them, their preferred food are honey bees, and a honey bee usually weighs just over a gram. If you do the maths you can see why they cause such devastation.”

photograph Frédérique Ripet, after her own hives were attacked, she vowed to find a solution, “I realised that you only need three Asian hornets to hover around a hive for the bees to be too terrified to go out,” she said, “If they do not go out there is not enough pollen to feed the larvae and they start to die. The queen stops laying eggs and the hive collapses.” A number of products were tried, simple chicken wire in front of the hives initially seemed to offer the best protection, even though it damages bees’ wings, "I developed the device using plastic, which does not damage the wings, and with fewer holes available to the bees in three dimensions, which are too small for the hornets to fly through, this means the hornets have to land on the Stop-It device and walk towards the nest, which lets the bees see them and use another entrance, and because the hornets are stopped and slow, in strong hives the bees are even sometimes able to attack and kill them” 

costing €28, at today’s rate £23.24, or $30.34 the Stop-It Max can be adapted to hives from all over Europe and the UK – each country has different hives and beekeeping traditions, Ms Ripert set up a company called Api & Bee near Agen (Lot-et-Garonne) to market her devices, the full article is here, but here is the thing, if you have any family, friends, acquittances that keep bees, or indeed know of any bee keeping clubs or associations, please forward this post to them, if it helps save even just one bee colony, it will have been worthwhile.