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Sorry Murox - did not appreciate your point re frame sizes. I use shallow national frames throughout in the interest of keeping a good back! Pre- Christmas means before it is too cold to inspect. I would not go in below 5 degrees or when the bees are clustered as per bee inspectors. Although in...

Wow so much negativity and supposition. I thought the whole idea of forums like this was to help share ideas and possibilities. We asked 30 beekeepers to get involved with this experiment. We gave each three colonies and tracked them monthly for a year. In detail! Instead of the swiping why not...

Honey yields = no difference at all. Two years ago we did an experiment with 30 colonies treated and untreated and the yields were identical. It staggers me that there are so many folk who do not try things that are slightly different but have such absolute opinions. I think that is called...

We did it first in the very mild 2 week spell in Feb 2018. 7 weeks later the bees in one colony swarmed. Now we hedge our bets and do it in December in order to remove the uncertainty. Initially we went through every frame to convince ourselves that they really were not swarming - it takes a...

Its a very good question. I often ask myself the same about top entrance and small cell beekeeping, 3 years ago I manned a stand at the National Honey show talking about small cell and treatment free. I spoke to dozens of people and many expressed an interest but many more said words to the...

Once the bees have decided to swarm they will do just that. They make up their mind months before. Reversal of boxes has its place and I sometimes do it if the lower box is empty. As far as checkerboarding is concerned, the key is to allow the brood to expand and not intervene. Any intervention...

I think it can and does work. I started using it 10 years ago and although the bees do prefer wax, plastic has its place. Cleaning up: I simple pare it down to the surface and that gets rid of the old cocoons and almost any pollen. easy to see eggs on black plastic. john

Hi Bob I have replied and started a thread under Swarm prevention john

A few local beekeepers and I have been experimenting with checkerboarding over the last two years. This is based on the concept documented by the late Walter Wright on Beesource – it is freely available. The technique involves taking a box of winter stores in say December and another box of the...

I think you make a very good point about the stress of swarming in urban/semi-urban settings. In fact anywhere there are people close by. It can be very stressful. For me personally it is the biggest headache in beekeeping and burns up credits with neighbours when I have to hack through their...

Yes it has and quite rightly so ie I agree with the research, the method and the conclusion that it does not work. I can say that confidently because unlike much of the research that I have read and seen others critique, I have done this over a number of years and seen the effect that small cell...

All that is perfectly reasonable. If you look at a single frame of brood you will typically see a range of cell sizes. In the middle of the frame they are roughly the same size. So in a colony of small (4.9mm) bees you can visually see a range of cell sizes and commensurate bees BUT the...

If you read my earlier post you will see that I stated that this phenomena occurs more often in smaller bees but not exclusively, The colonies . that Steve Martin has investigated are predominantly 5.4mm The recapping phenomena is not about creating and leaving holes it is about recapping ie...

It is fairly straight forward. Small bees create small cell sizes. Larger bees create larger cell sizes. It is independent of the genetics/drones/locality/species of bee. There were some theories about smaller bees eg Apis Cerana that have a smaller capped stage of their development and...

Personally I do not believe so because the cell width changes due to old cocoons is miniscule. Its all about the size of the bees predominantly but not exclusively. Oddie et al in Norway seemed to have unravelled how small bees (and some larger ones) manage their varroa load. It seems to...

The bees will make cell sizes according to their body size ie if you take a bunch of bees from a colony with 5.4mm foundation and put them into foundation boxes/frames they will make 5.4mm cell sizes. I have done he same with wild/feral colonies that have been resident in tress for several years...

That is a very fair point - the balance of expert opinion show against small cell. When you scratch beneath the surface of the research you quickly see that much of it was done over weeks or months. I don't want to get into 'expert bashing' but I can speak from my own experiences. I have...

Yes agreed and understood. I don't treat and now only occasionally count mite drops because I am confident the bees can manage their mite loads. When I monitored I ways always aware that there are many more mites within the colony than just those that fall onto the floor. What happens in my...

The whole science of varroa and mite loads within hives is very poorly understood. The varroa calculator on Beebase uses a number of very crude assumptions. For several years I measured mite drop monthly on up to 24 colonies and learnt a lot about varroa within hives. I have lost 1 colony to...

Hi, I have followed Mike Bush's way of keeping bees for the last 9 years. Myself and a bunch of locals all use small cell and it seems to work for us. I got fed up with pouring the chemicals and did no get into beekeeping to do that. I am not anti chemicals but would prefer not to use them. The...