Recent content by Peterwh

How do you know its a one year old queen? They all look the same to me. Also, why are you so confident its "a Buckfast cross"?

Ref starvation swarms: In any case, if such a thing did exist, how would anyone know that's what it was?

I leave the feed hole open all the time and the earwigs and bees seem to cohabits quite amicably.

Tell them that your bees have complained about allotment holders bumping into them.

I do wonder if good colour vision has a role in this. I have fairly bad red/green colour blindness. I can find the queen only around 1 in 5 times.

Maybe just woken up to how intrusive on the lives of bees beekeeping is

I dont think i will get a honey crop this year but it would be nice to have a full strong healthy colony before autumn Do you have information the rest of us are looking for?

Watching the bee's what?

Entry from a house bee's diary: Some funny bloke in a yellow suit that I hadn't seen before was hanging about all day today. Every time there was a bit of sun he took the roof of our house off. Then it would rain and he would put it back again. We were freezing. 30 minutes later he'd be...

I agree. Cutting disc is the way to go. Lots of dust. Make sure you have a respirator, gloves and goggles. Tabe up your trouser legs and sleeves as the dust will go everywhere. If you can get one, wear a welder's hood to stop it going down the back of your neck. To be honest, I think the...

Maybe they would settle it in the time honoured tradition of best of three rounds of rock, paper, scissors

I have one of these that I bought last year. It worked fine then. This year when I used it, the bees just drowned in the syrup. After successfully exterminated about 200 I abandoned it and haven't used it since.

First, there is no need to boil syrup, or even heat it. Just make it with warm water ( in the feeder) Second, on a point of interest, a question for Dr Nick: how do you get it to 116 degrees centigrade? Do you use a pressure cooker?

I followed the link and it prompted two questions: 1. What is a herbaceous animal? An organism is either one or the other, not both, surely 2. How does anyone know that animals find ragwort to be bitter? Did they put a complaint in the guest book?

I keep my bees in a very mature orchard. There are around 20 apple and pear trees and maybe 20 plum/damson/greengages. I've been picking fruit this week and noticed a lot of bees on the rotting plums along with the wasps and hover flies. Can the bees do anything productive with the plum juice?