Search results

Hello, We have a colony who were problematic last year, despite our best efforts they never really built up their numbers. They came through winter OK, but now appear to be queenless. We did not see any new brood a couple of weeks ago and have put in test frames with eggs twice now, and they...

I have seen a lot of posts about feeding fondant through the holes in a crown board, or laying it on top of the frames, and I have also read posts about stores being too far away from the cluster and bees staving even though there were ample stores in the hive, which brings me to my question...

If a colony is trying to raise 'king cells' from drone eggs/larva and maybe has some capped are the bees aware that this is futile and if you put a test frame in with worker eggs will they raise proper queen cells, or are they going to ignore those eggs until the 'king cells' hatch, at which...

Thank you for your replies Enrico, Ericbeaumont and masterBK. The excluder is a national wire excluder from Thornes, it is only a couple of months old and we have been very careful with it. It is probably not the problem, as suggested it could be my fault. We do try and turn the excluder over...

I had some assistance from a more experienced bee keeper yesterday to find and mark our queens. In one hive that was just single brood and a super, we could see lots of eggs, young larva and sealed brood, but could not find the queen. We even tried shaking the frames through the excluder. When...

We had a hive swarm in April and left a couple of the capped queen cells that were left in the hive to hatch to hopefully re-queen the hive. The weather has been awful so on the 10th May we out a test frame in the have and when we looked 7 days later (17th May) no queen cells had been raised on...

I bought a 'budget' bee suit at the BeeTradex last year but recently when working with a grumpy hive I discovered that I could be stung through the bee suit which was then making me nervous and I was not enjoying the beekeeping experience. I have now purchased a 'virtually sting proof' suit...

We did a colony split last week, and when we inspected the queen-less brood box today there are emergency queen cells as we expected/hoped to see. We have removed 5 queen cells and left the two largest and most sculpted. I have read conflicting accounts on if we should leave 1 or 2 queen...

Thanks, but why is 'shaking out' preferable to combining through paper, and what determines what method you should use.

When you say 'shake them all out' is this in front of another hive or where, and why wouldn't you try and combine using the newspaper method. We had a drone laying queen last year, it was from a small caste swarm we were given. We got rid of the queen and then tried to combine that colony with...

I have inherited a couple of hives form a beekeeper who has moved out of area. I have been told that all of the brood box frames are on standard foundation, and there is not a 'drone frame'. Is not having drone frame a problem? If you don't have larger foundation for the bees to raise drones...

Thank you for your replies. The colony was checked prior to the winter and was disease-free and had been treated for varroa. An experienced bee keeper has offered to help me on our first spring inspection to confirm all is well. Its a good point about the double brood being pushed down into...

We have 'inherited' a colony that are currently set up as double brood box. The brood boxes could do with some maintenance, and I have some spare brood boxes that I could swap this colony into, but before I do this I just wanted to see if anybody had any advice or warnings about this. I am...

Hi Eric, Can you please explain " I read everywhere that you can feed bees till they stop taking it. It’s not true." When should you stop feeding sugar syrup?

Thanks, that's helpful to know. I wondered if I'd done something wrong, I'll try that. Cheers.

I made a batch of thymol solution following the instructions from the Norfolk Honey Company The solution that I didn't use on the day I stored in an air tight jar. This was about 2 weeks ago, when I went to use it tonight it has a thick crust on the solution. Is this normal? Is it still...

My colonies are generally really calm, but the two occasions that they were really aggressive was when they were constructing emergency queen cells and the cells were not yet capped. Once capped they returned to being pretty calm.

Hi BugsInABox, We have lost the original queen 5 weeks ago when combining colonies, no idea why. We then thought we had a virgin queen who needed to get mated, but that should be happening now and it hasn't. So, we added the test frame of eggs and as they have made emergency queen cells its...

Thanks for the reply, you've confirmed pretty much what I had feared. Even when we do net a new queen hatched, its going to be the best part of 2 months between the last eggs and the new eggs, so there may not be much of a colony left for the new queen. I suppose the most expedient solution...

At the end of July our smaller colony which was given to us as a small swarm ended up with a drone laying queen and we were advised to combine this colony with our other colony which was also a small cast swarm, but which had been steadily growing in size. We combed using the newspaper method...