Recent content by Into the lions den

The big push is over. Now tidy up and wait.......relatively quiet month or more ahead..just adding boxes if needed up on the moors. Slightly down on numbers this year.....but only about 2%. 4961 on the heather. Got a lot of work between now and September on the nucs unit. Much subdividing...

You did the right thing. Sorry for jumping in on the thread...but you needed to know....and it was not a subject for pussyfooting around. Its a painful bit of education...but you will be unlikely to miss it in future.....and the smell of advanced EFB lives with you forever.

No...would not bother...best got rid of and split something healthy. Often see the two together. Regardless of which it is not a good situation. Whether it is a notifiable disease or not is largely a formality. This colony is not going to do well.

Not much will break me out of my summer absence. But this is one. The sad fact of having a decade long experience of dealing with EFB means I can assure you that not all cases are so obvious as showing the contorted larvae etc, especially of they are really good cleaners. Sometimes the larva...

Probably amongst my very final posts of the season........things are marching on and spare time now vanishes...in the blink of an eye it will be September......that's how our seasons feel. May June July and August just vanish in a blur. November (my most hated month) December and January feel...

Been out 'flagging' OSR sites all day ready for the teams moving bees this coming week. Passed quite a few apairies of smaller scale beekeepers and amazed how many were in there, fully suited, opening their hives up and examining them. It was 11C and in this area they are not growing yet...

In all but a couple of specials for customers it IS iserted into a grooved topbar and then embedded..so the top section does not flop when it gets warm. The ones with no top groove are for those who want vertical wiring...in which case the wires themselves hold it in place. Its of limited...

I can assure you it is NOT a myth that heather is an inferior winter food. Yes...most winters you will get away with it...but until you do a significant number of colonies over a decade of trying...which we have....you dont find the real pattern. Maybe one year in five or more it is a problem...

There are so many conventions based on opinions...rather than actual experimentation. For sure...done the tests years ago...... Bees do somewhat better with the same spacing all the way up. They also do better in an all deep set up. Spacing the frames out and getting really fat combs was...

NEVER castellations...anywhere. Being able to slide the frames along is a massive time advantage in all parts of the hive..with castellations you have to lift every frame individually. Everyone to their own but to me castellations are a museum piece and half the speed you can work a hive...

This afternoon I had a long call with a member of the trade very familiar with this story from the inside. The article is not complete and would not be nearly so sensational if the full story was printed about the UK linked findings. 1. None of it involved honey that was UK honey or purported...

I used to sell Greek pine 'honey' in the past..to some of the UK's top retailers. Its a honeydew rather than a honey....some analytical methods do not include the sometimes very complex and unusual sugars found in it. They are still sugars...........but in the mangled words of McCoy in Star...

There are multiple threads on this across multiple media and massive conclusions are being jumped to by lots of people, worst of all the journalists involved. There is very little, or even nil, adulteration of UK origin honey. Also beware of HAN. They are a pressure organisation set up and...

Agree with you there Michael. We use a parallel colour system to be sure we know which are our 'bred' queens and which are just field raised. Its the same for customers if they find a violet, or orange, or pink..and so on..marked queen. It is a very helpful management tool.

Never said it was. However water miscible and oil miscible compounds tend to stay within their own family of mediums. (maybe not strictly scientific..but unless they are specific types of compounds like soaps which are partially soluble in both then they keep largely to their own type. OA and...