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I think they might try to claim an out if they could relate the cause of the claim to the business. Suppose, for example , that you were melting wax in the oven and you overheated it and it burst into flames....

Flow hives are not an alternative way of beekeeping. They are an alternative way of extracting honey. But therin lies the problem with them, or rather with some flow hive owners. Some seem to have got the idea that flow hive is maintenance free and inspection free beekeeping. I look at the...

I have been following a wild/feral colony. I see it every day as the entrance is under the roof of my house. The bees arrived in 2013 and survived until August 2017 when they died out and the site was then robbed out. Despite my efforts to seal off the location another swarm arrived in May...

This might be a silly question because I have no experience of them, but do buckfasts breed true? I have seen it described that that they are hybrids, or at least were in Bro Adams time, and in other animals breeding hybrids with each other can give you unpredictable results.

Not personally, but I have seen photos of a few here, small combs built on branches. I suppose a swarm gets hit by bad weather and never moves from its original location and after a few days they start drawing comb... They would never survive the wet winters.

Then, even if his observations were correct, he was hardly observing a normal situation.

I have seen eggs like this on a bottom board before, in winter but not linked to vaping. The queen turned out to be a drone layer and the colony died out the following spring. I surmise that either the workers knew the eggs were wrong and were dumping them or perhaps that the queen was so...

No, i didn't remove any frames. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there was some there. But even if there was plenty of brood I would expect a respectable drop in a heavily infected hive

I had the opposite experience. I treated my hives with Apiguard in August/September. 10 days ago I vaped them with OA, put in bottom boards and checked the drop after a week. The first five hives had zero drop, nothing at all. I began to assume that I had messed up the vaping process but when...

Bees will eat duct tape and get rid of it possibly making a mess. But they leave aluminium tape alone. Aluminium tape is useful to make large insulated dummy boards out of kingspan.

Its all about getting grants and getting your research approved and getting funding. In the current research 'climate', a researcher is more likely to get funding for a project "Identifying the climatic drivers of honey bee disease " than a project "Identifying the drivers of honey bee...

I agree with Finman. It seems flawed. Perhaps there is a valid observation that colonies with varroa behave differently to colonies without varroa but to say this is to protect themselves is a jump way too far. I would also be looking carefully for confounding errors. I looked at the paper...

You don't say where you are located. Many areas in Ireland, for example, are black bee conservation areas, so taking in buckfasts into such areas would not be appreciated by your local association.

I think you confuse Brix and moisture %. Its 71.5 degrees Brix or 27% moisture for Extra Virgin Olive Oil.

I used to use a tiny black video camera, like a go-pro but a lot cheaper, which i wore around my neck during inspections, to record relevant info. After a few inspections I realised that it was a really bad idea. The bees zeroed in on it and attacked. Maybe it was the combination of black...

I found a queen cell in a super this year, in the arch above the brood box and QE. It was sealed and had larva and royal jelly inside. There were no other eggs/brood up there. And no other queen cells in the hive. I removed it but two weeks later they made swarm preparations in earnest

I would expect a 10 year old who was genuinely interested in beekeeping to be extremely enthusiastic, to soak up information and to pepper you with tricky questions. That this doesn't seem to be the case would make me question his real interest and wonder if he hasn't been sent to you by his...

No, don't link colour to year. I mark all my queens in yellow as its easiest for me to see, as another colourblind male :) A little module to record the ancestry or source of the queen might be useful.

Just a small point but I would tend to regard 'torn open cells' as indicative of a killed virgin rather than an emerged queen. Cells that queens emerge from usually have a very neat circular cap cut into the point, where the queen has eaten her way out. When bees wish to destroy a queen cell...

Putting electronic detectors looking for hitchhiking varroa on bees entering hives as a way to detect varroa incursions is probably the least effective way to do it. Video gave no indication of the accuracy of this method, rate of false alarms, or even if they had working prototypes. And even if...