Recent content by dommod

I've not made that claim. Evidence please. And even if that where true it has no baring on my argument. Can you describe in what ways the scenarios differ? I proposed that when you move a colony more than three miles without forcing them to reorientate first, a proportion will be lost. In...

It would be fascinating to get an answer to this question. If there were some pheromone involved in the swarming instinct and it could be isolated it would make re-homing colonies a very simple task.

Ultimately neither one of us has data, experience is not data. I think I've come up with an interesting hypothesis, which is weakly supported by the evidence. If correct then then it suggests a non-invasive technique could help to maintain colony strength after a move. I'm not saying that...

Sorry, perhaps I could have been more clear. By 'certain proportion' I intended the interpretation that given and not that the proportion is a known constant for all colonies. I'm not saying there is anything wrong in moving bees more than three miles, I'm saying that there could be a case for...

I've been pondering the moving of bees and was wondering if moving them three miles or more is actually bad for the colony but we don't notice the problem. If moving more than three feet, the old saying tells us to move them more than three miles; otherwise a certain proportion of foragers will...

I think there is a lot to be said for looking at our personal usage of the planets resources and trying to be less wasteful. It just frustrates me when the idiots argue from a completely unscientific viewpoint and don't understand why their opinion isn't valid. The whole chemical bad/natural...

Careful! Your wine contains the extremely damaging chemical C2H5OH and we all know how dangerous chemicals are! You really shouldn't be putting this dreadful poison into your body.

Thanks for the advise. My reason for extracting and feeding was for consolidation of the hive. Due to my lack of equipment at the right times this season one colony got a bit topsy turvy with too many boxes and in the wrong order. Thanks again

Hi, I'm trying to feed some honey back to a colony through a rapid feeder. I checked today and the honey has almost set solid, I can see the bees are trying to work the feeder, but they aren't able to take very much. I was planning to take this honey off, liquify it and then let it down...

I don't think you are correct. If you do back of the envelope calculation for a cedar brood box, you would expect it to loose at least 3.7 Watts per degree difference between the inside temperature and outside temperature. Assuming a 20Kg surpless left on a hive for a conservative three winter...

I don't think that the bees keep the whole hive warm. From what I'd read, its the cluster itself that is well insulated and overwinter the temperature within the hive but outside the cluster is close to the temperature outside the hive.

They've got quite an appauling track record. I haven't used them for ages (once bitten and all that). Extract from their Wikipedia page: However this story on The Register from December last year suggests things haven not improved. There was an image from the ebuyer offices that show that...

Avoid ebuyer like the plague. I, like many many other people have had bad experiences with faulty products and very poor customer services. Dabs, Amazon, Redstore are all better bets. There even used to be a website called ebuyerdotcon for disgruntled customers, but ebuyer got the lawers in to...

Now that I'm allowed to post images and links I can show you all these boxes I've made to hold wet frames. You can buy a shallow box that will just about fit a drawn national super frame and deeper box that will just about fit a drawn national brood frame. Both boxes from Wiko, shallow one and...

If you are going to argue from a scientific point of view, then its important that you get your facts and number right. 30C means 100 to the power 30 (=10^60), not 30 to the power 100 (= 10^147). While you've significantly overstated the dilution of 30C, you've significantly understated the...