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Yes, I'd dearly love to have an extraction room. Sequential extracting in our fairly small kitchen is not a recipe for domestic harmony.......

There are other threads on this subject. 'Search' for 'heavy supers'.

Guardian yesterday had this pic of V. crabro with remarkably yellow upper legs. Obviously to us cognoscenti it is not an Asian hornet because of its abdominal colouring and brown lower legs but it could confuse the public who are urged to report seeing the 'yellow- legged hornet'.

No wasps in either of my apiaries nor in our garden 400m distant. One V. crabro hawking around a hive entrance today, captured a bee on the wing and proceeded to dismember it in the grass below.

Should be OK in my experience. Belt and braces, you could consider both the newspaper and spraying both colonies with a scented air-freshener to neutralise their identity-pheromones - but I've never tried this myself.

Oo, haven't tried that. I'm finding benzaldehyde useful.

My max is five supers. I find it a pain to clear the bees so that I can take them off and extract. How do you manage to clear seven?

Placed on the ground beside a hive, they're strong enough (I weigh >100kg) to act as a foot-stool when adding a fifth super! They're much lighter than wood/metal roofs so I use them on my cedar Nationals.

Renewing the marks on last year's Qs. At long last I've learnt to mark with paler colours. Dark reds and greens just don't show up.

Yes, the pink pen in the pic was a Toma. The green Posca in the same pocket didn't leak.

:hairpull:

Strange difference - I usually have a patch of phacelia on my allotment and it germinates well and re-seeds if I let it. I grow it for pollinators of all types, particularly hoverflies and bumbles but few honeybees visit. However this summer there is a large field of phacelia 2km distant and for...

1. I take off the summer honey in early August. I then treat for varroa to give the colony the best chance to raise healthy winter bees. Seems logical to me. 2. There's no room for dogmatic gospel in beekeeping. The joy of the craft is experimenting with different methods.

Reminds me of the Kea parrots in the alpine regions of South Island, NZ. They are notorious for stripping rubber parts from parked vehicles.

The thing to remember is that, come spring, the super is still likely to have some sealed stores of syrup (at least the colony didn't starve) so one doesn't want that super to be used for incoming nectar. So I might: 1. Remove and keep it as emergency stores for a colony in need. 2. Don't remove...

I agree with the above except that I feed syrup into a super above the brood box so over-winter on brood and a half (no queen excluder between the two boxes). Standard practice is to treat for varroa in August after taking off the honey, then feed syrup in September.

SWMBO and I had a pleasant wooden toilet seat experience in Botswana about 15 years ago. Meant to be a small-group safari but there were only four guests. We moved camp every couple of days. The 'boys' would pitch our tent which included an attached screened en-suite area open to the sky. Within...

Brilliant!

I agree my laurel hedge has finished flowering. RHS website states that cherry laurel has leaves 15cm long cf. 'garden privet' leaves (Ligustrum ovalifolium) are 6 cm long - Curley's privet leaves look longer than 6 cm. However RHS website lists many different types of privet so maybe there's...

Your second pic looks more like cherry laurel, Prunus laurocerasus than privet, Ligustrum ovalifolium. We have dozens of hedges of the former in this very rural village - shame because it doesn't look natural - huge numbers of these hedging plants were raised by a local nursery - now defunct and...