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One of my hives lost it's queen and built a load of supersedure cells. I went through today and removed them all (I hope). I did spot the cell in the image which looks fat enough to be a queen cell but it lacked a top. Does this look like a cell that a queen has emerged from? One other...

After a thorough inspection of both hives we find that the original queen has died. There were capped queen cells and no visible uncapped brood so she must have popped her clogs at least a few days ago. I've ordered a new queen which will arrive in two or three days time. When she turns up I...

Just checked on the new queen in the hive that was split off my old one. There was unsealed brood so, touch wood, the hive will be a success. :D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gscgnksIH0U

We split our hive in two. The original was very strong with lots of bees, brood and honey. Everything went well with the bees being as calm as normal even though we were wrecking their old home. :p It took quite a while to do and was very tiring, I've got Chronic Fatigue, but I had saved up...

It wasn't the flow that was an issue for me, it was the OMF taking all the heat out of the vapor which then recrystallized on the OMF. This may be less of an issue with different metals, my OMF is aluminium which has a very high thermal conductivity.

I do my second oxalic acid vaporization treatment today and talk about some how to use one with a polystyrene hive. In particular I found that it's a bad idea using a vaporizer below the varroa inspection mesh. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9qyMVr923k

The only info I have found so far on OA vaporization is that it doesn't harm brood. Like I said I am not ruling any treatments out. I posted here because of that, I want to know if there is an advantage to using thymol in autumn rather then just sticking with OA vaporization. I would like to...

I'm not ruling things out, I will use any treatment that is necessary. One thing that would definitely rule it out would be evidence of varroa building up resistance to OA vaporization. Does anyone know if there been any evidence of this happening?

Is it possible to just use vaporized oxalic acid as your varroa treatment and not bother with others like thymol? For example do the usual christmas treatment with oxalic but also do the fall treatment with 3 doses of vaporized oxalic rather then thymol. I am wondering as I got a lot of very...

I have ordered a vaporize for the job, but thanks for the heads up. :) It was an unusually sunny and warm day, but even so I didn't pull out the brood frames for fear of chilling the little ones too much.

Bare in mind my inspection was about a month ago and the bees have been bringing in lots of pollen for quite a while now and have lots of honey in the hive. I'm going to do a quick inspection on Saturday and check the brood but I wanted to start considering options now in case I need to buy in...

I have pre-ordered a new queen that will be coming in about two weeks, however I have found that I need to treat my hive for varroa. My inspection on the 7th of March showed that the hive was building up well with about 3 or 4 jumbo langstroth frames of bees (not sure how densely packed as I...

The bees have overwintered really well and look to be building up to a good number. I am planning on splitting the hive in late April so I am very pleased with their progress! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUfeGrVRFKc

There is a lot of honey in the brood box now so the winter preparation is going well. The number of bees is well down now, few enough that I was able to take the last super off. I took out the second, and final, tray of Apiguard today which concludes the varroa treatment. The brood being reared...

Yeah I swapped that frame back in and put another in it's place on the floor after I thought about it. :p

I put in one tray of Apiguard when I took the supers off for honey extraction. This time I put the second one in as well as doing a full inspection, I didn't have the energy to do one at the same time as extracting the honey. The queen has really slowed down on the brood with roughly half as...

We have just finished our first honey harvest. In total we got 76 jars with an average weight of 355g. Not bad for a first year that started with a package of bees at the end of April! I know I can't be objective but this honey tastes so good! This first batch is for gifts and personal use, I...

I recruited my dad to help lift the supers off so I could save my energy for the brood inspection. While he was doing that he weighed the supers. Right now we have, very roughly, 5 stone (31kg) of honey. The bees are still very active and we have a lot of flowering plants nearby. I did a sticky...

Thanks for the advice! I think I'll go with Apiguard in a week or so.

I've just done a 24 hour sticky board check and found 21 mites, I also did a hive inspection so that might have knocked some more off then usual. The colony has something like 50,000 to 60,000 bees. That seems like a level that indicates the hive needs treating. However the queen is still laying...