Recent content by Peebels

Oh gorilla gardening, I did some of that the last year down our local park area. They had torn all the ground up with track vehicles doing some “refurbishment” work, made a right mess and destroyed most of the areas where the wild flower grew. I got some thin compostable brown paper bags and...

I have recently made some enquiries about placing some hives on one or more sites of a local organisation with an extensive range of sites of differing forage. They have so far agreed to this prospect but have asked me what kind of forage I would be interested in, which is undoubtedly a really...

Hi All Just thought I would see if any of you can offer me some advice about using two different types of hive. I currently have a three hive site where I use 12x14 national brood boxes. In this coming year I am looking to establish a second site by artificially swarming one/two of my...

thanks for all the input, very helpful! :)

it there was a small area of uncapped honey that dripped when shuck, could it be shaken out while the rest is still capped and they exstracted normally?

well in that case i might leave it longer, my bees are covered in that stuff! :)

I understand that now is the time to be removing super, but what do i do with frames that are not totally capped, which is most of mine really. They do not appear that eager to cap off and finish a frame, they would rather start a new one, messy sods! I would quite like some honey too! P

Thank for all the replys. I have been down today to check all hives and it does look like it came from one of mine. Now everything has settled it does not look like the swarm was actually that big after all. I would have liked to maybe keep the swarm as a nuc/small colony for overwintering...

My thoughts exactly. If it was not for the fact they had been seen on my poly-tunnel (this forms one side of the apiary) i would have assumed they where not mine. The flown queen was new this year and was very good. I suspect the swarming is largely down to my inexperience and full...

Hi all I wanted to canvas some opinions on what different people would do in my current situation! Early yesterday morning on of my hives (superbee) swarmed and i have been able to retrieve it. It is currently in temporary hive (temp because its not the same quality as the others and would...

nope, new one to me! But this is my first year! :) Thanks everyone! P

I had a look through my three hives yesterday, apart from one appearing to be queenless (it swarmed about 3-4 weeks ago), I happened to notice something a little odd. A lot of bees appeared to have a very white line down there back. Upon closer inspection this appeared to be slightly fluffy...

Thanks Heather. Previous advice was to block off the plastic for a couple of days to allow them to get used to the new queen then to unblock it and leave alone, my plan was to unblock them today.

On Friday I did some hive splits and carefully positioned new mated queens in cages in all the now queenless hives. At present the candy in the cages is blocked off but i have made a slight error in my endeavours. I have added the queen cages directly to the hives without providing them with...

Prolonged exposure to bees causes accelerated growth of facial hair and subsequently a large beard! (not sure this is just a male beekeeper thing? Would any ladies like to comment?) :blush5: