Recent content by drdrday

I seem to have luck with bait hives on flat roofs, and that makes them easy enough for me to access. I tend to put out 6 frame poly nucs as bait hives or an old Paynes nuc with the feeder cut out. They're not as big as is recommended, but as beekeeping equipment seems to get rapidly out of hand...

Finally did my first inspection of the year = 16°C and sunny today. All were beautifully calm bees. One colony still a bit small, but Queen is laying so will just have to see how they get on over the next couple of weeks. Double brood colony already has drones, with plenty of capped drone brood...

I'm a castellations user in my supers. However, when i got my first colony they were on brood frames with plastic spacers. I was put off using them in supers because they were so hard to get off once they'd been on a while and well and truly propolised into place. Of course frames in the supers...

It will come up again from the smallest scrap of root - I seem to be on an eternal quest to remove it from garden!

Thanks for the advice. I actually have couple of replacement ball bearings I got for my manual extractor. If I'm lucky they'll be the same size.

No gouts of smoke in my hives - but still smoke in my lungs as the wind blows and the smoker stands off to the side (just in case) not mention the amount as I'm lighting it.

Just ordered Thorne's electric heavy duty plastic extractor, so glad to see you recommend it. Until now I've been using a manual 2 frame plastic extractor, but it's just getting too time-consuming and laborious with the amount of honey I'm producing each year, so I've bitten the bullet and spent...

Been busy reorganising the new apiary over the last couple of days. I've now taken over the chicken's area of the garden giving me much more room. The last chicken died a couple of months ago, and we'd already decided at the start of last year not to get any more. I really hated having to...

I bought an Apisolis last year - not just because it's another gadget ;) I'm a teacher, so it feels like I talk non-stop all day long, and I noticed that on Monday/Tuesday my voice was suffering, before gradually improving again as I went through the week, until my next weekly inspection on a...

Had planned to put escape boards on the hives today so I could take the supers off tomorrow afternoon, but the lack of fully capped supers changed my plans. Going to leave them one more week, with the uncapped frames in the hopes that some of them will be capped in this week's forecast hot...

I got 4 spare veils for my suit at £1.50 each. Considering the original lasted me 3 years I should be good to go for the next decade or two. I'll miss STBK

'Honey never treated above hive temperature' is a claim I could easily make on 95% of the honey I sell. My honey typically doesn't set for many months, usually well over a year. I'm still jarring honey from spring last year and haven't had to heat any of it yet. I'm not saying that everyone...

I had exactly the same problem with the same bain marie from Thorne's. Seems as though it's a common fault, and really annoying to find water pouring into your moulds along with the wax. The issue with mine wasn't that the edge hadn't been crimped over at that point, but that in smoothing off...

Painted a couple of new poly nucs with whatever paint was to hand... Think Putin will see these Ukrainian nucs as a threat? ;)

I designed my own labels and I have a laser printer, so I print them onto A4 label sheets then just cut them with a knife. Having my own design means I can print the best before dates directly on the labels (I use Adobe Illustrator to edit the design) - I just print as many labels as I need...