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You can do it, but one queen will die, as likely to be the "wrong" queen as the "right" one. Worse still, one queen may die and the other may be damaged. If both are equivalent queens, then simply unite when you happen to see one of them.

Indeed. The only reason to go through the whole thing is to check for queen cells during swarming season. Other than that - as soon as you get to a frame of eggs or very small larvae, you have a queen, close up. Full inspection - about 20 minutes. Checking for the presence of eggs - 5 minutes.

Don't know any beeks, but there are lots of hives in the mountains a few miles in from the coast. I used to ride bikes there (serious training), and there were loads of apiaries. The honey is great as the hillsides are covered with flowering herbs all year round.

OSR just gone over. Hawthorn at full chat Lime trees coming soon Field beans about to start up. Looking good.

It also assisted the "not so beginners". I've never seen supers filled so fast. Thankfully we have a pile of spares, but I have been frantically nailing frames together! We are doing the first extraction this weekend - looks like 12 supers.

A lot of this can be in the handling rather than the strain of bee. A simple example from this season. I have three hives with queens from the same source. One is located in London, the others are in Berkshire. The London one is not making swarm preparations at all. It is just starting to...

Bee vision is shifted to shorter wavelengths - so they see UV and colours towards blue. They are "red-blind". No idea what a field of OSR looks like in UV, but from the reaction of the average hive, it probably shines like a searchlight.

I have been testing my new dayglo orange Sheriff suit. It is much better than the (not particularly cheap) circular type veiled one I got from a well known bee-keeping vendor near Windsor

They are a nuc, so I would not be moving frames around at this stage. When you have 5 or 6 frames of brood and a good strong colony, sure. Leave them to grow, and as long as the weather holds, no need to feed. When you check them in a few days, as well as looking for queen and brood, check...

Don't understand this. Either you're missing queen cells, or you have something strange going on. We have lost 1 swarm this year, due to the awful weather preventing us going in. We've lost several others, but got them back - and I would be the first to admit that all of them have been...

Checked my London hive before going to work this morning. As I have not managed to inspect for 2 weeks, I was sure the queen would be long gone. As it happened, she was there, with no sign of swarm preparation at all. Not even a play cup. Just a happy hive full of bees, starting to fill...

Nah, roll it up the right way, fix the turbo and drive off. People who off road them do far worse than that, then drive home in the evening It won't be bent, the bodywork on that side will be mullered, but second hand bits are cheap and you can get the whole thing resprayed quite cheaply...

The hive that I keep in central london has just had its second super added. Honey gathering is certainly slower than in the country - some of those hives have filled 2 supers in the last week and are now on 4 supers.

Ours were grumpy up to the beginning of the week. They are much better now as they are working hard and generally happy with life. We've had quite a few incidents of single minded bees smacking into us and getting over excited.

Not extracting much? After a catastrophic start to the year, they're motoring fast at the moment. One of ours has just had the 4th super added. I was out adding supers yesterday evening. We will be extracting at the weekend....

The weather has got us this year. If it is raining at the w/e, then no inspections. No inspections during the week as work gets in the way. We lost one swarm at Easter, and another (Which we recovered) last week. 6 hives have done AS and are not a problem.

Safety point is important. The amount of energy in a circular saw blade is immense, it will have your fingers off in the blink of an eye if you get it wrong. The biggest risk is kick back - when the work piece does something unexpected, and you try to stop it, and in hurriedly doing this, you...

Your problem is that you have no idea what is in there now. If there is a virgin, then you could lose your new queens. Virgins are notoriously hard to find. If you have nuc boxes, then I would take a frame out of each hive, and check it really, really, really closely for a queen...

How many stings? My tolerance for individual stings has got better over the three years of keeping bees. When I started, getting stung was a major event, lots of swelling, hurt like hell. These days, if I have been sloppy with my gloves, I get one or two on the wrist, no swelling, just a...

We have had several hives with capped cells and the queen present and correct. We've been unable to inspect because of the rain/temperature, but have got in pretty quickly when the weather was better. Though one hive swarmed on a suicide mission over the Easter weekend. We also had one hive...