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Personally, I wait until the spring flow has begun to harvest the previous year's honey. Reasons are: Leaves plenty of honey for the winter (which acts as thermal mass as well as food) and whatever remains in Spring is genuine surplus. But mainly it is to avoid robbing behaviour when taking it...

What are your losses overall, throughout the last 6 years?

Firstly, the only method worth relying-on for getting accurate mite numbers, is an alcohol wash (or there’s a similar method using washing-up liquid) Whatever you do, is only going to be worth doing in one of the following circumstances: 1) you have lots of colonies spread over a wide area...

I run the horizontal Two-Queen setup pictured, except that each brood box is a nuc (or rather, I use a dummy-board to restrict it to a nuc size until the autumn) I have only been doing it since last year but so far neither has tried to swarm yet.

Fascinating, thanks :)

LMAO! I can certainly admit to lying in bed while (over)thinking. But I don't usually ask a question unless I have looked elsewhere for the answer and drawn a blank or want more. I suspect that what makes my questions seem left-field is 2 things: 1) I enjoy knowledge for its own sake, and...

My google-fu has failed me. Can anyone point me towards any studies of navigation specifically in AMM? Since they are known for flying in cloudy and rainy conditions it seems to me that they must have something else going-on that A.M do not.

Bees! Ffs lol. Just transferred a caught swarm, small one most definitely a cast and with (I assume) a virgin queen. Plonked them into their new home with some syrup since they have already used their reserves in the bush they were collected from. 10 minutes later I see those same bees in almost...

I think that's a fair position to take when giving a broad overview to an uninvolved audience. His audience wasn't beekeepers. (Although he's also wrong about the feeding upon blood; It's the fat-body they feed-on) In this kinf of thing, what may be needed is an easily digested sound-bite that...

In fairness, if I were a trapped worker, that is the noise I would make :D

So, as the title says. Definitely not quacking/piping, firstly I recognise that sound and secondly this is a freshly caught swarm with no brood yet, only eggs. There is the steady hum of a happy colony but occasionally a single bee gives-out "meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee" not very loud. Any ideas what...

Forgive my ignorance, what is a “keld” queen?

For context, I'm a newbee too with a lot of reading and study but not much experience. But the answer to your question is yes, all honeybees will eventually swarm given the appropriate circumstances/triggers. You may have encountered lists of swarming "triggers", and it's not that all of these...

OK, so I caught a swarm just 3 days ago. They will be getting syrup tomorrow and OA vape soon after that. Given that they have not benfitted from a spring flow (and they are drawing their own comb too) I am wanting to get them built-up as much as poss for the winter. Should I feed them...

They favour the genetics furthest away from their own. But my question is whether the response itself is unreliable; nobody "in nature" is notching the comb to elicit that response; I am wondering if it's really necessary or not. Perhaps, when left to their own devices, they don't always get...

Ok, so been reading-up about OTS queen rearing with interest. All understood, but it raises a question for me: If pulling-down the cell walls is needed for OTS, then does this indicate that the emergency response in other situations is unreliable? (assuming there are enough eggs, nurse bees...

May I ask the reason for leaving 2 QCs but only protecting one?

Thanks for the update! Been curious about it for ages!

I have a question about that, thinking of how things might work in a feral colony, bearing in mind that such colonies (in trees) are typically a single deep's worth. My working theory was that wax moth do a sort of service in clearing-out brood-comb as the winter cluster moves up and this is...

The theory is (and according to a couple of people who’ve tried it and run it currently) that with supers on top, nurse bees are promoted to field bees faster then normal and this keeps the broodbox from congestion while the queen has limited room to lay. It’s the equivalent of removing a frame...