Recent content by raysa

Oxalic acid vapours are extremely dangerous to humans, and applying OA by the 'gassing' method needs a great deal of care. Dribbling it from the top is simpler, safer and effective. Don't worry about opening hives in mid-winter for a brief operation like this - the bees are really not troubled...

Just to clear up one point which has been hinted at but not spelt out ... a refractometer with a range useful for honey (such as the models mentioned with 12-27 water%) cannot be calibrated with distilled water. Water is 100% water so obviously way outside the range of the instrument.

Haven't been active for a while but have recently been feeling quite keen to get back into it. Used to do mostly 40m CW. Ray G4XUZ

When I first took up beekeeping in the 70s there was an old boy in the local bka who always smoked his pipe when working the bees. One day someone persuaded him he really ought to wear a veil as a good example to the newcomers, so he put one on. Then he collapsed in a choking fit because he was...

The main requirements of labelling regulations are pretty clear, and it takes no more effort to print (or get printed) labels which meet the rules as those that don't. Can't say I favour deliberately getting labels wrong just for the sake of a Euro-rant. And there is an important point to the...

The rule is well known about moving hives without losing the fliers (less than three feet or more than three miles), but what about when uniting colonies? Unitings over paper are most commonly done within an apiary, with one of the colonies being moved a fairly short distance but beyond three...

Not for the bee sting, surely? Antibiotics are for bacterial infections. Ray

I am a great believer in PH's signature "Bees to nothing invariably". So while supercedure cells are often in the middle of comb and swarm cells often at the edges, and the numbers are often more for swarming, none of these guides are certain. I would even amend Wedmore's quote "If one of...

If that sort of difference existed there would perhaps be more point to having both forums, but in fact they both can and do deal with the full range of questions from very basic to advanced technical. And they both do it well. There is quite a lot of overlap, but also quite a lot of...

Sorry to be disagreeable, but I can't really see the point any more. The bbka forum police made some daft decisions a while ago but I suspect they have learnt from that and would be far less likely to be so officious again. That forum has settled back into a normal exchange of ideas, advice...

The excluder duty is to exclude the queen from where you don't want her to go. In this case I wanted her excluded from the second brood chamber as well as the honey supers. For the reason explained, it made sense. Ray

On the few occasions I have run a double brood hive I have used a queen excluder between the two so that there's only one chamber to check for queen cells or find the queen. As frames of brood became full and capped I'd move them into the other chamber to let them develop and hatch, and replace...

Feeding intended to stimulate egg-laying was often recommended years ago, but is much less favoured these days. However, there is less agreement about what should be fed to bees if a colony is found to be very short of stores at this time of year and emergency feeding is needed to combat...

Do you have a friendly local printing firm? They may be prepared to put them on their folding machine for a small fee. The sheets of paper, I mean, not the ex-Woolies staff or boy scouts! Ray

Fascinating stuff, Gavin. The description of the sensor on the leg (as well as the fact that it is in the leg at all) tends to support my earlier assumption that this is more geared to vibrations felt through whatever the bee is standing on rather than airborne acoustics. I can't help...