Recent content by rogerb

Hi Sean did you get sorted? I have just split a couple of colonies and am sure I can spare one if you would like it. Should be ready in about two to three weeks. Six frame nucs and I charge 120 each. Cheers Roger ps I am in Aberdeenshire

Hi Johnny, IMHO it depends on your bees; some it will work a treat and they will never swarm if given enough space and others it won’t help a bit. Queen age will also have an effect, the older she is the more likely she'll go. Do you have swarmy bees or don’t you? If you know the answer to...

Scummy honey = mead….:cheers2:

You can do this but it will be a palaver on such a big hive; Get a spare floor and roof, put your half box on it with the supers and then close it up with a lid. Walk away for five minutes, when you come back one hive will be roaring, the other will not, the quite one has the queen in it. Now...

Hi Magwat, most of mine came with a stick of wood in the bottom to stop the bees from drowning (looks like the base rail of a frame, and that’s what those that came without now have), I have lost a few bees in them, but the worst I’ve had amounted to about a one bee thick layer at the bottom...

Am I the only one who likes (and uses a lot) the internal feeder? The bees build a lot of brace in there but it’s easy to scrape off. I cut a little square out of the corner of the clear plastic cover so I can pour in feed from the edge with minimal disturbance. Cheers Roger B.

Hi, I’m a bit cack-handed with the marker pen so have some fairly well decorated queens and none of them seem any the worse for it, don’t worry too much mine have always been okay. Cheers Roger B.

Is this the biggest this hive has ever been? Many colonies can be very easy going till they get to a large enough size and then they can become quite nasty, splitting them I think will make them much easier to work with, but you are storing up trouble as before you know it you will have two...

There is no mantra (or for that matter dogma) in the words; “can” and “sometimes”, nor any debate in their accuracy. I like to let the bees choose to rear queens in their normal way, as I feel they are better at it than I am. Not a bad place to start if you’re a beginner???

If you constrain them so they go to swarm and then do an artificial swarm method you will always get good queens, emergency reared queens as above can sometimes be of poorer quality. The operation is just as easy and gives you loads of queen cells, with which I would suggest you try raising some...

Yes with rapid feeders it is, I don't use them anymore, as the bee losses break my heart. Try contact types, the little bucket with a mesh lid, take a plate with you to up end it on or you'll spill a lot of feed, not much of a problem now but at the end of the year can set them all off...

I think £20 to £30 a frame represents a fair return for the bee breeders time, equipment and loss of honey crop. So nucs from £100 to £120 if five or six frames and a full colony more (maybe not quite pro-rata). The concept of it costing nowt and bees should be given away for free is one of...

No such thing as a daft question, you might get some daft answers though; If it’s winter and your using the dummy board to enclose a small colony (nuc) to help it through, then close it up tight and even fill in the void gap on the other side for insulation, but it may have been better to...

Pete D, I do exactly the same as you and it works for me also, so stick with it. To everyone else, empty boxes do not achieve my beekeeping objectives, if they do yours then good luck to you.

Sorry to be controversial, but I feed fondant and lots of it, the obsession of feeding fondant every winter, comes from wanting your bees to survive, in my part of the world many lost all their bees last winter (2012-2013), most lost 50%, I lost none. In your part of the world you may not need...