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Potato blight alert! Yesterday on our allotment I noticed that potato Ratte (main crop, planted first week April) is considerably afflicted with blight. Second earlys Charlotte and Casablanca (first root dug today, planted last week of March) and Desirée (main crop planted second week April)...

I happened to be in the garden this afternoon when I heard a vehicle pull up alongside my roadside honey sales box. A female voice from the far side of the very thick tall hedge which separated us was wondering how she could obtain change for a twenty pound note - purchasers are asked to put the...

I started beekeeping on Lang Jumbos - beginners' course at Sparsholt Ag. College, Hants,1972, theory sessions alternated with building our own hive in the college woodworkshop. There's no way I could manage to lift a jumbo lang nowadays!:(

I have two Gard'apis with Trappit bait and have caught two queen wasps, nothing else.

Oh, go on JBM, give us some clues.....:eek:

Strawberries (from one raised bed) and mange-tout peas doing well but autumn and spring planted onion sets and gooseberries doing badly.

I'm not sure of the answer. Try this catalogue which gives sizes. https://www.thorne.co.uk/frames-foundation/frames

Where are you in Suffolk, Fido? If possible, it would be good to get a second colony - you learn twice as fast and if anything goes wrong with one eg. queen failure, you can use the other to donate brood.

That's a shame Murox - is it too wet and windy? - presumably not too cold, being bathed by the Gulf Stream. I believe there are rose growers in Scotland eg Cockers of Aberdeen.

Our Rambling Rector is in full bloom. For the first time I noticed honey bees and various bumbles collecting pollen.

Make sure that you remove the QExcluder!

I was interested to hear on the vid that your honey flow in Tas lasts only 4-5 weeks each year - very different from our season April to the end of July (+ August on the heather moors).

Thanks Antipodes - very useful, though when I try shaking I'm not as successful as Gordon Ramsay in shaking off nearly every bee - my super comb is unwired so there's the risk of shaking off the comb as well! My problem in post 21 is rather different: to perform 7-day inspections from mid April...

Crikey Drex, wish I could claim the same..... Problem this spring re 7-day inspections was the cold wet weather in mid-April = many posts on the forum advising too cold to open the hives, then a sudden honey flow (200 lbs from five hives taken off 4th week May) so boxes too heavy to lift off and...

I admire your enthusiasm but, as above, the cost of buying all the basic equipment will be large - and things can go wrong eg. poor weather = poor crop, bee diseases, winter colony losses etc. Keeping bees requires quite a lot of theoretical knowledge but most beginners' training courses take...

Update: The one procedure I hadn't thought of when I posted above was to clear the top super with benzaldehyde (much cheaper than Bee-quick). I sprinkled the BZL on a fume board placed directly on the super frames. Within minutes the bees cleared, indeed from the top two supers on a couple of...

Yes, I can rarely load a pic direct from my photo album, I'm told 'File too big". I have to 'Export' to create a jpeg then attach.

I grow a patch of Phacelia for pollinators on my allotment = bumbles and hoverlies, very few honeybees.

Ah, got it at last....:iamwithstupid:

Yes, red pollen sacs fairly frequent in all my hives but it's difficult to see a single bee on the blossom of the two nearby horse chestnut trees.