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Thanks to all for additional comments. Clarification: bees were not imported from Italy by us, but purchased from an established supplier in England. Queens were imported - by the supplier - but we understood the bees in the package to have come from their English apiary. We had no problems...

Hivemaker, thank you for that suggestion. Having looked at the symptoms described on BeeBase for CPBV, I'm happy to say that they don't fit with what we're seeing. Pargyle, the hives are T*orne's cedar 14x12. Your comments make a lot of sense to me. Considering the timing, it would be possible...

We kept bees for about five years in a very rural mountainous area of central Italy. It wasn't all plain sailing nor a huge success in terms of honey production, but we did learn a lot, we managed to actually keep bees through some pretty harsh winters, we built up our colony numbers at a modest...

The Buzz about Bees: Biology of a Superorganism by Jürgen Tautz isn't much use as a practical guide for working with bees, but it made me appreciate even more just what amazing creatures they are.

We lived in the Abruzzo region of central Italy for eight years and kept bees for six of those years at our farm in the Apennine foothills. It is certainly true that even small Italian supermarkets normally stock a range of varietal honeys, but our experience left us wondering about the honesty...

I wonder if those hives have thrived or even survived? I've been to Venice several times and I think it's an amazing place, but it also seems to me hard to imagine a less "bee friendly" city. In most urban areas, there are parks and derelict ground to provide forage, but the open spaces in...