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Cleaning the whole lot in oxalic acid will kill all the varroa. Won't harm the poly boxes. Cheap enough to make a dip tank full too.

Overrated German rubbish. 80k it's about due to blow up then.

I know a lad that makes a fortune selling this for animals. Not sure how he infuses it though I guess that is the tricky bit. Normally involves heat that would damage the honey beyond the point of selling as honey.

All my queens are clipped. This gives me other options during swarm season. If I find the queen then she is removed or killed and then replaced with a queen or cell. If like some queens they hide then no problem, she is clipped so cannot fly, let them build cells and try to swarm, the bees...

it's varroa. The white pile of varroa poop is also where the varroa mate with their brother. :sick:

https://www.yankodesign.com/2021/08/27/this-sustainable-beehive-replicates-the-microclimate-of-the-bees-natural-habitat-with-its-design/

Some of it is as already said "Big Brother Syndrome". I want to keep honeybees to save the planet brigade. Some of it is ignorance, the companies supplying these are not beekeepers and are only out to make a few quid off the back of bees being big press atm. Where my wife works the industrial...

As long as the bees are registered on beebase you can keep them in what you like and do with them as you like as far as I'm concerned. Too many people are refusing to register bees and too many businesses jumping on the greenwashing bandwagon with new type leave alone hives and none register the...

Old queens don't fight, david tarpy set up a hive and that had 20 old queens in and they didn't fight. Virgin queens have the fight instinct but as they age they lose it and like you say the workers do the killing. David has studied queen fights and it is quite interesting, they don't fight...

6mm I think. Something like that. edit Can't find anything specific about the size of hole drones fit through atm but 6.2 to 6.4 is the cell size. Mouseguards are 9.5mm holes.

The interesting thing about DMP is that by the time the drones leave the hive they are no longer making the pheromone. They may have a store of it but there is no more being made. The older the drone the less it has. Some have created a DCA with a bag of drone heads or caged drones. If you have...

Yeah, I know where the closest one is to my apiary. Wasn't hard to find as it is a hill in a flat landscape, an old slag heap to be exact, now covered in trees. The theories in beowulfs book make the most sense as to why they are in the same place year on year.

If it's cold it won't make nectar so a super is pointless.

One local ***** is coming close, he likes to follow people on his electric scooter shouting abuse at them, he will very soon fall off his scooter.

At junior school Mr Charles the head had a big plimsole as a favourite weapon. I received this a few times, he got very excited while delivering the punishment, he would make you stand with feet apart bent over his desk, the plimsole would hit your backside first then curl round for a nut shot...

Found a useful tool on Google earth today. If you want to know the area of a field use the ruler tool and map the outside of the field and it can tell you the area in hectares. Found a field of beans this morning 500m from an apiary and measured it, came back as 30 hectares. Measured the osr...

Is there a gap between the escape and the frames in the super below it? Sometimes removing a couple of frames above the hole in the clearing board can also help. I find if there isn't a space between the escape exit holes and the frames in the box below the bees down move down well. Never...

I had that on a colony. The mesh in the floor was different from yours it was the expanded metal type, turned out the smaller wasp vespa vulgaris had been squeezing through the floor. Found bits of dead wasp waxed into the mesh. Totally different situation to yours as the mesh is different but...

It may be in the future. At the moment I have enough to do trying to keep up with the building of frames and woodwork involved in expanding. Adding another 50 this year. Once the colony numbers have reached the number I want then I can look at possibly modifying the boxes. No time atm.

I like double brood. I find 14x12 hurt my dodgy wrists after a short while inspecting. The colonies seem to like them too. Ideal size for most of mine would be 18 national frames, they seem to average 14 ish frames of brood throughout the season although the odd one gets up to 20. Downside of...