Recent content by Alex Brown

The stronger of my two colonies was bringing plenty of pollen in yesterday - a very pale yellow colour. Can't identify it from any of the online colour guides though... and there's not a lot around flowering at the mo here. Still, always a heartening sight at this time of year!

I also once put some wet super frames outside the hives for the bees to clean up on similar (dodgy) advice, and have since learned the error of my ways. Aside from the risk of disease, it attracted hundreds of wasps who also then took a keen interest in my hives. They also seemed to enjoy...

Just messing about with the macro function on my fairly basic Canon 'point and shoot' camera today. Quite pleased with the result...

Thanks for the useful replies folks! I probably won't have time to get hold of a refractometer this time, but might look to buy one for next year. In the mean time I'll probably do as Oliver suggests and extract the frames I'm a bit dubious about separately, and maybe use this honey for...

I've had a similar predicament. I've got a massive honey flow coming in from the copious amounts of balsam near to where I live, but mite levels are up. Having taken advice, I've decided to extract what I can now so I can treat with Apiguard to ensure the winter bees, which the queen will start...

Yesterday, I removed the honey supers from my two hives ready for extraction. Most of the frames are nicely capped and good to be extracted, however a few frames remain uncapped, or just capped on one side. In an ideal world I'd have left them a week or two more so the bees could have ripened...