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Yea, that adds up in retrospect, thanks all.

Not sure. As soon as we gathered the main cluster from the tree above into the skep and placed that on a sheet down on the pavement, the road bees all duly wandered over and climbed right in, so Q looks like she was in the cluster on the tree. Could it be the ones on the road had lost her scent...

my wife and I suspected exactly that, so we scoured all the bees on the road for ages trying to find one, but didn't, and all the bees seemed fairly spaced out - none of them were clustering together, which is what I'd have thought would happen if there was an additional queen. It was just the...

Collected a large prime swarm yesterday from a tree on the pavement on a quietish cul-de-sac estate. What was weird though was the huge number of bees not in the cluster in the tree, but spread out across the road beneath, all waiting to get run over by cars. It was over quite a large area, say...

Thanks for the great video Richard! Glad you got them in safely. One thing, I saw you returning back to the box to collect bees that had returned, no doubt because the Queen's pheromones were still on the bait hive surface where the swarm had congregated. A really good tip that was I given once...

Hi, I'm a web developer of some 25+ years experience (yea, yea, old git). Helpful tip - PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) can harness local storage for offline use when no 4G/wifi signal and there are multiple options for types of offline storage from simple key/value pairs for simple data types to...

I genuinely apologise if anything I said was construed as pejorative, it certainly wasn't intended as such. I don't know what it was, but if anyone thought I was attempting to insult, I clearly need to work on how I write. Again, sincere heartfelt apologies, as a beginner this forum is an...

Yea, sorry, didn't intend to turn this into a dissection of 'raw' honey, the spirit I meant it in was am I damaging the enzymes etc in the honey if I heat above 40C. Looks from the replies (thanks all) that it's ok to just below 60C? I might try that, see what happens to this honey. I reckon...

Ha! Fair enough. You read all these contradictory things and don't know what to believe.

I read however that if you take the honey above 40C then you're destroying enzymes in it? Does it not also mean it is no longer 'raw'?

Hi all, Last year I bought 3 hives off another beekeeper, all full of honey and bees (he had to shift quick as his daughter had a bad reaction to a sting). Lovely colonies and we extracted loads of honey out of them. Bonus. However, the honey we extracted from these 3 colonies granulated very...

Just as an FYI about Whitworth's Sugar, I asked them where their sugar comes from: "Thank you for contacting Whitworth's Sugar. All of our granulated sugar is grown in France." Reckon they won't be as cheap next year then. :(

Our local Farmfoods branch in Suffolk was still 2 x 1Kg for £1 yesterday, and I asked them how much I could buy and they said I could have the whole lot if I wanted. There was a huge pallet of it all piled up. I managed to limit myself to 50 bags, but with Farmfoods vouchers (just sign up...

Well, if a DIY-luddite like me can make these things, anyone can. Not exactly the best quality in the world, but it sure has these wasps fooled already.

So this morning I am mostly: Have at thee, wasps.

Thank you everyone, I really, really am very grateful for the help and advice you given me here. Reducer back on. Bees have a fighting chance now.

Ugh, and so because with MAQS you have to remove the entrance reducers (so as to ventilate) that we had to protect from the wasps, the evil ones are having an absolute robbing field-day, in and out of the hive as you please, in their tens, twenties. It's not easy, this, is it? The hive has a...

Yep, agreed. That's a relief then. Hoping the MAQS will sort out the varroa without killing queen/supercedure/removal of brood.

Thanks all, really, really appreciated. We're attempting to rule out the varroa aspect first, so we've applied the MAQS strips we had already, and those get taken off in 7 days time. Presumably if that's not the trick, and it is wax moth, then we just remove the affected frames and put them in...

Supers are still on and I didn't think it was ok to use Apivar with supers on. This is 1 of 4 colonies I have, the other 3 seems to be tickety-boo, although I have to admit, this colony does seem to be down on numbers compared to the others and isn't as productive. Worried about MAQS as heard...