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The weather in the UK is such that we can't make queens early enough for them to get established and make a crop in the current season. Countries with warmer climates are able to provide queens much earlier than we can.

The best way to introduce any queen is to give them no choice. After that, it's out of your hands. 1. Make a queenless nuc of sealed brood and young bees (if you have time, raise frames of brood above a queen excluder for 9 days to make sure it's all sealed, then brush/shake the bees off the...

You and I had the same thought, I think. :D

Your frame spacing may be a little off - check that your frames are pushed together. They do tend to draw the comb deeper at the top of an upper box i.e. where the transition between is brood and stores (pollen and honey) but this is easily scraped back with the hive tool.

Yes. Not as many as last year but there are lots at my test apiary

Multiple apiaries - name & location (linked into a map so 1/2/3 mile radius rings around the apiary shows overlap of flying distance. A nice-to-have would be the ability to store crop rotations so you can see what is is due to be sown this year/next year. Layout of the apiary with prevailing...

I'll bet they weren't the cheap Tool Station/Skrewfix tools either. modern hand-tools aren't as good quality as they used to be (or they cost a lot more)

The black currents were "Ben Sarek". The fruit is the size of marbles after a couple of years. What's more is that you need never be without them again: Just strip pencil thick prunings of most of their leaves and put them in a bucket of water. In Spring, they'll develop white water-roots and...

I'm glad to see Royal Mail didn't kill them

Be careful. This is how you lose your tools and find her "having a go"! ;)

I aim to introduce virgins asap, usually on the day of emergence (although, I have read it's possible for up to 48 hours). The longer it takes to introduce, I'd expect more to be rejected. Honey is ok to sustain a virgin queen for a few hours but she really needs to be fed by workers. Some...

A normal drone is "haploid" (he has a single set of chromosomes which he receives from his mother). A diploid drone occurs when the queen fertilizes the egg but one/more of the drones she mated with were closely related to her. A better description would be if the contribution from the queen was...

One of the things you can do is to learn how to test drone maturity. This video is specific to instrumental insemination, but, the first part shows you how to evert the endophallus and expose the semen. There is really little point in raising queens unless/until you have drones that are...

Unless they have absolutely nothing, I would leave them alone - have patience! If they have nothing at all, remove the super and let them store a little in the brood nest - but, be very careful that they don't clog it with honey so the queen can't lay. If they have one frame of open stores, they...

David Austin was a plant breeder. They have lots of shrub roses. If you type "thornless shrub rose" in the search box, you get several possibilities. You might like to take a look at them and select the size: LICHFIELD ANGEL THE SHEPHERDESS KEW GARDENS You might find something suitable...

I don't think you can go far wrong with David Austin roses.

EDIT: my over-wintered colonies currently occupy a 20 Langstroth frame brood area and are pushing up to the 3rd deep (I use only Langstroth deeps) and it has been a very poor spring with no osr being grown nearby. I would expect them to have filled at least 3 deeps by now in a "normal" season...

When introducing a new queen, the vast majority will be young workers that have never flown before. They accept the queen (hopefully) and she begins to lay eggs. Usually this occurs before the end of July but it's no big deal if you introduce a queen later. It just means she'll have less time to...

Well, I can't say whether that's true or not. I can only say that I've done it this way for many years and learned a few things along the way. One of the things that surprised me the most is that virgin queens may leave their nuc and enter another one (not necessarily adjacent or pointing in the...