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I was told that Thorne's standard foundation is produced from imported beeswax from China which comes in by the container load and premier is produced from British wax.

Last Autumn I united several colonies so I now have them on double (national) brood. My thinking is to keep them on double brood but to reverse the boxes with the aim of placing the probably empty brood boxes on top to give them more space to expand upwards and reduce the risk of early...

Big wasps ? could they be queen wasps looking for somewhere warm and dry to hibernate I wonder.

On the subject of wasps I thought this was worth a mention. Whilst in the garden today I spotted a queen wasp on a leaf on my fig tree copulating with three drones who took it in turns to get a piece of the action.i felt very privileged to witness such an event when she swiftly flew off with a...

Mark, I had the same problem with my extractor, these are now 30 + years old and showing their age.But there is a quick and easy fix. Measure the distance on the spindle between the collar at bottom of the cage and the collar which interfaces with the bush. Then cut a section from a copper water...

Try cutting a piece of sponge / foam to size. Easy to quickly block the entrance and remove without harming any bees

I used some black plastic brood foundation a few years ago.on the plus side it is easier to see eggs against black background. Against this it is a messy job to clean off old wax to reuse.I've now reverted to wax foundation.

Plenty of ideas on YouTube to deal with this ! Search ' reducing water content in honey '

I agree with little_bees except to say that at this time of the season when queen wasps have stopped laying the worker wasps are redundant and instead of predating insects as protein for young brood they turn their attention to sweet rewards in which case they outlive their usefulness.

A little carpentry may be called for , filling holes caused by knots, runners are not included either but otherwise they are good value and I have seen keen Beekeepers buy them by the pallet load leaving not many for anyone else.

According to a local bee farmer who is also a seasonal bee Inspector whenever his bees are not bringing in honey they are being treated for varroa. Round here where it is almost entirely agricultural decent volumes of Honey have finished by end of July so mid August I start treating for varroa...

I wonder if the honey you have might have been from phacelia.it is very pale , similar to borage honey and tastes great.

A commercial Beekeeper I know cuts out the wax from the frame and uses an apimelter to separate honey and wax. Due to the cost it's not viable to do this on a smaller scale so we use a clean paint scraper and gently scrape the comb back to the foundation replace frames in super and given back to...

65 pence per kg in Aldi yesterday.

I should like to know whether it is necessary to fit plastic inserts in OMF floors during treatment period. I have checked Apivar use instructions and faq but it is not mentioned. So I thought I'd check here and ask for advice. From what I can learn Apivar has slow release so I guess it is not...

I built a bee vac using only a 30 lb honey bucket a cordless car vac and a length of hose and it worked a treat. A swarm could be sucked up in only a few minutes , it would take every single bee before they knew what was happening and it was completely portable. Once captured they could be...

I have found through experience that bees will not take down syrup that is tainted by mould so throw it out and make some fresh. Dave Cushman website contains sound advice on application of thymol to syrup. autumn feeding containing thymol will not taint honey in following spring but if you...

My thermostat is set to 50 degrees Celsius and will melt one of two 30 lb pound buckets of set honey in 24 hours. As the previous poster says 50 degrees is not going to damage plastic buckets.

Here is another point to consider. If you have sufficient number of hives to justify purchase of an electric extractor then it will be worthwhile to convert supers from ten to nine frames , using 9 frame castellations. Fewer frames loaded with larger quantity of Honey are easier and quicker to...

I suppose I should have qualified my remark by saying that in my part of the country Borage ceased to be grown for economic reasons. The last time I took my bees to the Borage some years ago the farmer was growing a field of Borage under contract to a seed merchant.He told me that the merchant...