Alfred Street (University of Auckland Store)
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Bumblebee Keeper : A Personal Story Of Pollinator Management
Paperback Edition: 1
Forget what you know of (honeybee) beekeeping: this is a different game. In this unique and detailed text Nelson Pomeroy lays it bare.
In a candid account of his career as a student, scientist, businessman and teacher, he details most aspects of working with bumblebees: outdoor nesting sites, laboratory observation hives, crop pollination and commercial-scale rearing. His innovations range from specialist concrete to electric heating systems, mass-producible colony starting containers and bumblebee feeding systems.
Bumblebee colonies are small, with a peak of up to a few hundred bees. He grapples with this from various angles from measuring colony productivity and foraging strength to measuring pollination stocking rates.
Bumblebee Keeper blends a personal narrative with practical information. It will interest readers from pollination management through bee biologists to those with an interest in agro-technologies. It concludes with a selection of bumblebee conservation issues and challenges decision-makers on the best approach to sustainability of pollination for food security.
Nelson grew up on a sheep and cattle farm managed by his father on the edge of the hill country in South Taranaki, New Zealand and attended the tiny Omahina school on the edge of the farm. Always interested in wildlife he wrote - Nelsons Nature Notes - for the school newsletter. He kept a nest of bumblebees in the house as a teenager and later kept queen bumblebees, trying to start nests with them, in his hostel room at Massey University. After an MSc thesis there that studied bumblebee nests from the home farm, he took up an invitation for PhD studies at the University of Toronto where he researched the role of the bumblebee queen in controlling her workers.
Pages : 176
Publisher : Independently Published
Publication date : 2023-05-19
Subjects: Non-fiction, Published in New Zealand, New Zealand, NZ Biography & True Stories, NZ Natural History