Recent content by masterBK

Demonstrating bees to others without the veil on was quite common practise in the 1970s. This is me in 1975. A gentle colony was chosen and as mentioned by Eyeman, the hive was also moved to bleed off the older flying bees (the potential stingers) which flew back to the original site to join an...

Not lost a colony from starvation in decades (don't tend to see isolation starvation if wintering on double BCs as bees can get to all the combs via the bee space between the boxes) but I do get up to 4 losses most years (from 23 to 30 wintered colonies) due to late supersedures that don't...

I was under the impression that because reduction division occurs in producing the egg plus because cross over can also occur (exchanges of portions of chromosomes between homologous pairs) the resulting drones while possessing only genes inherited from the queen will still be genotypically and...

Many years ago (early 1960s I think) I watched a worcestershire beefarmer with 400 hives sort out which hives to take to fruit farms in the Evesham valley . He got most of his money from providing hives for pollination and would only get paid for queen right colonies (the fruit farmers have the...

At 74 you might be one of the youngest members in some branches of some beekeeping associations!

Is this what you mean? I have always thought this is what I was told was pickled pollen (bee bread) ie cells of lactic preserved pollen

I use Apideas to get my queens mated. I "Demaree" my 25 double-brood colonies as my selected method of swarm prevention. I get my queen cells started (used to be grafted but the last few years I have used Cupkit as I find grafting at my age beyond me) in a 5 frame queenless congested...

I went to my first beekeeping class aged 11 yrs in 1958 , got my first hive in 1959 and kept just two colonies until 1974 when I expanded rapidly up to 25 hives which I have been running ever since, all on double broods. Now aged 76 and with dodgy knees I am finding the lifting/carrying more...

The use of old comb as wax moth bait is not new. I have been doing it for decades ( I have been keeping bees since 1959 and setting up bait hives since 1974) . In early spring I remove any empty grotty black and distorted combs from my hives and I put them in bait hives (I use spare equipment )...

Median wasp side view

I removed the last supers from my 20 hives last week and found that they had not capped quite a few combs. So used refractometer and found (taking several samples) that the honey in the unsealed cells was almost 20% water (legal but far too runny). Placed the supers in a small room (with no...

Where are all these multitudes of swarms coming from? I have had 6 swarms go into spare equipment stored outside in my garden during May. Down at the out-apiary have had a further half a dozen swarms go into bait hives yet only one has come from my colonies ( a colony with three year old queen...

Nice day today so did my Ist inspection of 2023 (not been to visit the outapairy bees since before Xmas). All (24 hives at outapairy and 2 at home) still had plenty of stores . They had variable amounts of brood with one with11 frames of brood (I use double BC national hives) while another had...

Saw a queen bumble collecting pollen from hellebore flower today. Seems a bit early for them to be on the wing