Recent content by SunnyRaes

Ahh good, that's comforting! At least we don't have the guy at work selling his honey for £2.50-£3/lb this year like he did last year - so far...! That was a down point after last years harvest...

Sensitive subject I'm sure, but.... We seem to recall that the rough price of a pound of honey last year was around about £5-£6. Whilst I've not seen any ultra local honey on sale in any of the shops yet, the fairly local stuff seems to be going for around about £4.25 - £5, or the...

OK, in which case we'll leave till next week when we swap the Apiguard trays. There has been no Varroa drop on this hive anyway.

Celebrating removing Supers? Well that's what makes the money to offset the price of the hobby, it's been a good harvest this year, you can take supers off from whenever you want and the bees are getting whatever they bring in from when the supers were taken off, so what's wrong with that? As...

They'd be strong enough to over-winter if they continued with a queen, but if they replace this queen - for whatever reason - then that'll be a significant period without new brood at the worst time of the year, assuming a replacement queen even mates. The existing queen is new (2013, red)...

So would you just leave them to it & see what I have after 2 weeks with the apiguard? I'm just worried they are quite a small hive & so late in the season to get a new queen. They will not be big enough over the winter.

Last Sunday I put the first tray of Apiguard on my hives, when I got to the last Hive I saw 3 loaded Queen cells ~ short of time before sunset I destroyed them & put the Apiguard on. Now I have a conundrum! Do I leave the hive alone for a second week as suggested with the Apiguard & risk a very...

Well I decided to give up beekeeping this weekend. I was mainly doing it to help out the other half, but apparently all I was doing was confusing things, contradicting and getting in the way. I was offered a hive, but it seems daft having 2 people managing different hives in one garden! Given...

We've extracted our supers, and now want to get them cleaned out by the bees. previously putting them above the crown board as I was taught the bees have not cleared them (even gave up & left them loose on the lawn to be "robbed" clean. But I know this is a very bad thing to do). So any...

I think the manual Giordan extractor is going to come in above £500 including postage from UK suppliers (which is a shame given it's less than €400 on the Giordan website) so I'm now looking elsewhere. I'm shying away from FleaBay. National do a couple of interesting extractors... They've got...

OK, not my suggestion, but thought I'd run it past the forum. Would it be sensible to store supers on the hive? In other words, put the super above a closed crown board. Would it be sensible to store supers on the hive during Apiguard treatment? If not, why not? (I believe that it would...

OK, lets back up a bit... We have 2 hives which have little to no stores in the brood box. Most of the stores are upstairs - either in a super, or in their old brood box after a comb change. We want them to take the stores downstairs. It's not for lack of room downstairs - in both cases...

Yep, we would perhaps have removed earlier if we had an extractor. Meh. As long as it is a catch 22, then we'll remove and treat rather than keep putting it off. I take it if we were leaving a super / brood box of stores on over winter we'd still want to remove? Apiguard success is based on...

The other question is, how many supers would you clear at a time? I'd personally have said 1 super at a time and give them time to get used to less space (so 1 a week perhaps), although this will obviously take a lot longer to do. Other half has been clearing 2 or 3 at a time