Recent content by Legs

Checked on the girls. Saw queen, BIAS on seven frames, loads of pollen coming in and plenty of waggle-dancing. We consolidated into one hive over winter, so I'll spend a bit of time tomorrow prepping all the kit to do an AS in the coming weeks.

Really? Nothing in the OP suggests so...

Good job lebouche - that looks like it was hard work! not worthy (Although I'm in Staffs now, I grew up in Burghclere, just south of Newbury and a couple of miles from Brimpton)

Saw two queens emerging from QCs in a previously-queenless hive as I was inspecting yesterday evening. One had distinctly gammy rear legs so choosing which to keep and which to freeze was easy!

I'd be very, very wary of attempting to cultivate HB on your land. If you allow it to cross outside your boundaries, you are breaking the law. Bear in mind that it grows like the clappers! I used to work for the Environment Agency and a considerable amount of our manpower was put into the...

I know that hindsight is a wonderful thing, but, having noticed that your queen was small and difficult to distinguish from workers, wouldn't it have been sensible to have marked her there and then?

Cheers folks - I'm looking for a supply of intact pallets for constructing a compost heap...

where are you getting your free pallets, madasafish?

;) I'm not keen on drinking this...!

Checked over our supered hive and showed it to my visiting parents. Sadly, the bees have been taking a fair bit of the honey back down - the only nectar source they really seem to be exploiting at the moment is Himalayan balsam. Didn't see the queen. Then my folks left and my missus joined in...

I felted a hive roof yesterday evening. Will plonk it on one of my Langstroths when the adhesive has had long enough to firm up.

We'd got Japanese Knotweed in the paddock where our hives are. What we did was cut each of the stems just below a node, and fill them up one at a time with glyphosate. Has been pretty effective so far. Dried out the stems on an outspread tarp and burnt them.

We just captured our very first swarm in a hive in which we'd given the top bars a little smear of honey. But the scouts were drawn to the scent of the foundation even before that.