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OK, well I may have jumped the gun. How long is too long to leave it? Is there a point at which the bees in a Q- colony are just too old to raise QCs and then be around to raise new brood when the new queen starts laying?

OK, but if the queen I eventually found was not laying after, say, three weeks then doesn't that imply that she was either infertile or unmated? Obviously I hope I didn't jump to the wrong conclusions...

Interestingly, I went back in today aiming to knock down to one QC whatever EQCs I could find. Colony 1 was still egg-less but, to my surprise, there were no EQCs on the test frame. There have been no eggs evident since early May, and there were still none. So I reasoned that there must...

OK, thanks for that advice. I'll reduce to one then.

What is the rationale of reducing EQCs to one? They aren't, I presume, likely to swarm with the emerging queens. Would it not be better to let them sort out which one they want to keep?

I have a colony which appeared Q-. I'd left in a single QC after I think the queen disappeared in a swarm 22 days ago. The QC appeared to have emerged but I hadn't seen the queen and I left the colony alone for a while on the basis that she was probably in there and I didn't want to disturb her...

I have a digital thermometer. But I find that manipulating the heat (Aga or induction hob) so that I can maintain a given temperature is very time-consuming.

Does anyone have any tips for warming honey to de-crystalise it prior to creaming? I've read that the temperature should be kept in the low 40s but, given the time it takes to melt a big jar, it's quite difficult to achieve that as a steady-state for some hours. How hot is bad?

I did exactly the same a week ago. She was a new queen and managed to get paint on her wings. I was very concerned in case I'd made it difficult for her to fly and mate. But actually all seems to be well because when I looked yesterday she had started laying so either she flew OK and mated or...

That's the badger... I scraped off the brace comb from both before replacing the top and so I hope it doesn't happen again. But that plastic coversheet looks like just the ticket. Thanks.

I have a split in a poly nuc. I checked them today and all is well, the new queen is mated and has starting to lay (eggs seen but no brood yet). However when I lifted the top of the poly nuc (it's one of the National Bee Supplies ones with a two-level lid/feeder) three of the brood frames had...

There was another thread on this recently with some good advice on moving colonies more than 3m and less than 3 miles. Moving Hives I recently moved 3 colonies about 150m and it was achieved without too much difficulty. I left a nuc at the old site and each day collected those foragers that had...

I’m slightly confused by the advice I’ve read on this. I have two big jars of honey taken off a few weeks ago. It has set solid (probably largely OSR). I also have some large jars of more recent honey which has not yet set. I want to make soft-set honey and the advice I’ve found in the BBKA...

Today I was going through the bottom and top BBs on a demaree'd colony which I believe swarmed a few days ago. I was double-checking that I had only one sealed QC in the bottom BB. In the top BB there were a few QCs (supercedure cells?) and I began to take them out. As I levered one of them off...

So what would be the best thing to do now? The colony would seem to be Q- and, until the introduction of the QCs I gave it today, was also QC-less. Would I be best going back in tomorrow and reducing the number of QCs I gave them to one?

I have a colony which I Demaree'd about a month ago. So far so good in terms of inspecting, swapping brood from bottom to top and empty frames from top to bottom. Lots of bees and lots of stores. All the signs of a booming colony as far as my untutored eye can tell. However on the last couple...

This is my first season so maybe I'm over-keen but I've had two supers off this season so far. I extracted around 6 kg last weekend and 9 kg today.

As accurately predicted by some, whilst the circulation of frames appears to be working, there are now some stores going into the emptied brood frames in the top BB in addition to into the top super. Should I be concerned about that? How do I stop it? How do I encourage the bees to put all the...

I've just extracted 9 frames of more or less fully capped honey. Delighted, but it's clear that I need to improve the means by which I clear the supers of bees. On this occasion, I put the frames into a single spare super and carried them away from the hives for clearing. Then, I used Bee Quick...

So, for testing, what do you do? Take a match or something and take a smear of uncapped honey and put it on the refratometer? Where in the frame is the most telling bit to sample? The seem to be capping from centre-top downwards, so I'm assuming that somewhere in the bottom corners of the frame...