Search results

It is all so much simpler if you use a long deep hive. Just put Cappings to half fill a honey bucket and put that inside the hive body , right at the back, separate from the occupied frames but touching the hive walls. Bees clean out any honey but do not restructure the wax as much as they...

I,ve never had a problem …but if I felt threatened … what about using heavy stands to take two cols plus spare boxes between …/ then screwing floor boards to the stand.. thief has to bring own floor boards .. too easy? Screw hive body onto screwed down floor board, just 4 screws difficult to...

Better not to get any smoker. puffing smoke into a colony panics the bees with threat of a forest fire. Handly calming. you would not puff smoke into a dog’s face to calm it. a fine water spray clears top bars beautifully.

How best to find/kill old queen in a violent colony?

This old forum was interesting to read - but most posts limited themselves by considering only winter monitoring. The opening post - quoted above - mentioned monitoring ‘temperature thru the various periods of the beekeeping year’. That is my own interest and I wonder if we can restart this...

Draughts were not the problem with the floorboard hives - it was the variation in width of the bee space betwwen the frame sides and the rippling hive side. You are absolutely right that lining the sides with thin ply would have worked - and by carrying the lining 9mm above the sides would have...

My first ‘long’ hives for 14x12 frames, so ‘long deep’ were made in 1975 from floorboards recovered from a demolition site . The boards were slightly humped and I butted them alternately top in and top out , so got a rippled wide board. No good for a well-made hive -now used only to store...

Thank you.

You seem not to have read my post. It clearly says that I do not make or sell hives, only offer free information on an alternative design that , IMHO, can better suit hobby beekeepers today (has suited my own hobby beekeeping for over 47 years after using Nats for ten years). It is of course...

I use the Dartington Long Deep (DLD) hive, developed 47 years ago so well tested. The DLD is designed to be made at home , no joints, just butting together plywood pieces cut at a local builder’s merchant - needs a pair of long window clamps that might be available from your association - or...

So you may have learnt something!

Really? What guarantee are you offering to cover opening brood boxes and taking out brood frames in temps of around 2deg will do no harm? Does the guarantee cover providing me with replacement colonies if mine die?

I thought I had posted this extract from Wally Thrale’s March advice note to all Beds BKA members, 450 or so. Wally is speculating that stored ivy left too little space for the brood that needed to become winter bees. There I do not agree with him, as my understanding is that winter bees...

I don’t look inside a hive at Xmas time as the weather is cold, well below the temp inside the cluster. What I might try is inserting a thermometer between the central frames, that I could read thru the glass cover board. I have read that the temp is about 35deg where brood is raised but...

Now I agree with you. If my losses re-occur, I doubt it is worth keeping bees here, if losses have been triggered by long warm period while ivy is flowering, due in part to climate change . So that is why I am so keen to uncover what happened. Just assuming that many local beekeepers suddenly...

Do you agree that we can detect when there is no longer any brood in winter by waiting until there are no dark cappings in lines on the vr board? Usually At Xmas in my area.

The question was whether black and yellow bees both raised brood into winter - certainly they will both fly - and wear themselves out , maybe unfortunately for them. I take the point that excess vr will kill colonies. But why are there so many accounts of heavy losses from bkprs in north Herts...

This is assuming that all honeybees react instinctively in the same way to temperature. But in their long evolution, different sub-species evolved in different climatic zones - melifera in the northern european forests which can have long winters, lingustica in Italy with no or short winter...

The best time to treat is midwinter when col is broodless. You cant open hive and use sugarroll or alcohol wash at that time. Mite fall is indicative and safe.

‘It has been accepted for years’…. Accepted by whom, on what grounds, by what level of beekeepers? Mites die and under gravity, fall. So are an indicator of the population size. Not exact, but an indicator. None invasive monitoring, excellent. All that is needed to decide if urgent treatment is...