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Thanks - yes, double brood with QX + 2 supers. They are OK at the moment, but the colony is just recovering after being Q- for quite a while after a swarm and failed raising of a replacement in May. It is Q+ now from same stock (been in lay a couple of weeks or so) - in past experience they...

My bees seem intent on mainly using the brood boxes to fill with nectar rather than filling supers - there's a whole empty drawn super on top of a partly filled one, yet top box of the hive (which previously was nicely empty to lay in) is now mostly full of nectar. I've shuffled a couple of...

Have this year had two failures at getting a mated queen: lost one queen who flew during inspection - and unsuccessful emergency queen - lost hive to laying workers; other swarmed hive failed to requeen (and the recaptured swarm absconded!). I was down to last chance from a frame of borrowed...

Inspected on Sat - not a great day bee-wise. Landed up shaking out one hive with laying workers (pepperpot drone brood, mutliple eggs in cells, on walls, etc) - lost queen from this in 2nd inspection, and clearly replacement queen has failed. Second hive which i caught the swarm from 3 weeks...

Inspected yesterday - Looks like swarm I recaptured has partially absconded, as no sign of any brood, and not much comb being drawn out, though still some foragers present. Gave them a test frame to see if they are definitely queenless, but will probably merge those back in with the parent hive...

Same boat here really - we as a family love keeping them, don't think I'm doing too badly, but just struggling with time and other things to let me enjoy them on the way I'd like. Going to try reducing to the largest pair of colonies (currently have 5 in garden!!) and see how it goes for a bit...

Watched today as the swarm I caught on Fri evening came piling out of the hive and started to swarm again. Small ish cluster settled on an apple tree, so started to go and get kit to catch them again while they settled. They never did, but instead all went back into the hive I had put them into...

Made up a full super with foundation, reorganised swarm and parent hive into a vertical split with snelgrove between to bleed the rest of the flyers down. Thinned QCs in parent down to one - will reinspect in a few days to thin out any new ones (looks like cold weather congestion triggered swarm...

Mowed the grass in the orchard/apiary this evening, with plan of splitting hive tomorrow morning (been too cold to even think about it...). Didn't get that far until youngest asked my wife - "Mummy, is that a new hive there?". And so I have now caught my first swarm :) Assume this was the hive...

Forecast looks much better next week - but cold here for a few days yet. Hoping it's warm enough on Sat to get in my biggest hive and check for swarm preps, and possibly do a pre-emptive vertical split. Not been able to inspect for 8 days now - let's hope they don't up and off in any short warm...

Ground frost in W Oxfordshire this morning...sun currently out, but rain forecast later - temps going to struggle to make it into double figures and next couple of days not looking great either.

:iagree: The OP was talking (I presume) about oxalic alone - esp given then have dihydrate crystals.

(And "degradation over years", if the case, I would not consider to be a short shelf life)

That was my thought as well. HOOC-COOH can't easily be oxidised further (without anything like an MnO4- ion or H2O2) so I was struggling to see exactly what might happen to it in aqueous solution. If you have other impurities then yes, the oxalates will react (eg iron -> complexes, calcium ->...

Could do with checking a couple of hives, but too cold to even think about going near them... :-/

I seem to have quite a few on each inspection - I am happy to donate for research....

Pure oxalic solution, I would have thought to be quite stable? If sugar mixed in it's different (formation of HMF, etc)

In what way? (genuine question - in that she's being superceded early?).

I'll have to sort out my double brood hive as well in the next couple of weeks I reckon - that many frames with brood on may not fit well: could be brood, supers, snelgrove then double brood on top for a bit while those in the top emerge, before I can reduce it down to two boxes split by the...

Finally hived up overwintered nuc at my "temporary out-apiary" - found a couple of sealed QCs on only one frame with no previous signs of swarm prep, not even a queen cup. Q found and BIAS present. Q is getting on a bit (she's blue - the nuc being made during an AS last year) so might be...