Recent content by manek

I was about to abandon Beetight as my record keeping software, as the developer, Matt Kane, once if this parish, seemed to have abandoned it. But no! Eventually, after a couple of unresponded emails, I heard from him today, and he's fixed the bugs that had begun to get on my wick. So he's...

Yes, I always leave them a nadired super. Starvation wasn't wot done it.

Checking out the heinous crimes list? I don't open live hives in winter. I opened them up when I found they had stopped eating the fondant, and after I had determined - ear to the hive, knocking on the side, and using a stethoscope - that there was no life inside.

Mine were all wooden Nationals on OMFs, all roof insulated with 50mm of Celotex - same as my other apiary's hives which survived and thrive. As for what actually killed the colonies, can't say I'm absolutely clear about the mechanism but I am fairly confident that environmental factors were at...

Deleted.

Symptoms? They were feeding on fondant until mid-December. Then early January I found a small huddle of dead bees on the brood frames, a few on the floor. No heads in cells. No varroa frass. Even the 14x12 which had been bursting with bees in the summer succumbed, despite having two supers...

Thank you, that's very helpful.

Aware that this has been discussed here before, but my question is slightly different. This last winter I lost three hives in one of my apiaries, all identical symptoms, and I'm convinced this was due to exposure: it's a windy site especially in winter. It faces south but that's also where the...

Thinking about it, the three hives which died were in full sun, south facing. Formic Pro treatment was in August, lots of sun, max temp on the instructions is 29.5 deg. C. Which could have been exceeded in those three hives - that's the common factor - but not in my other three, which are in shade.

Definitely looks like a dwindle - but where have the bees gone? They'd usually be piled up on the floor. There were none outside the entrance either.

I didn't fully inspect much after July when I took the harvests off on the grounds that I don't like disturbing them more than necessary. The Formic Pro went on in mid-August and by the end f September, I had fondant on. But what's odd is that all six of my colonies, three each in two...

SImilar here: I lost three colonies in December - half the total. One looked a bit like late queen failure, with a few bees on the frames, a light sprinkling of bodies on the floor and a handful of play cups, but of the other two I have no idea. There were simply no bees, just a dozen or so on...

It's certainly underreported here, where in the port town of Newhaven, just a few km down the road, several V. velutina have been spotted, captured and reported. Not much mention of this incursion by DEFRA. Looks to me like there's a nest somewhere...

Could be. Or could be a combination of that, and workers now emerging from secondary nests we didn't know were there.

You cannot release a non-native species into the wild. Best thing is to capture and keep it until the AH team arrives. They can then track back to its nest. Failing that, zap it. But then we don't learn anything, such as: "are there any more of them?"