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We have a number of colonies for sale, ranging from nuc size to full size 14x12 with 8 frames of brood. Temperament is average, they are local mongrels, but well enough behaved. Sounds obvious, but all have a laying queen with her own brood. 14X12 or standard national are both available...

Well I never thought I'd see it. Two yellow marked queens laying up the same side of a frame, not more than 4 inches from each other. The first one emerged in the brief period of warm weather in April, the second one in the last few weeks. No idea which is which, but presumably the first...

I have occasionally mentioned the hive of super-aggressive bees that we were given last year. A quick recap: - A local beek gave up last year, and give us his WBCs, one of which was occupied. - We went and inspected it using our "normal" gear, only to be met with the most ridiculous onslaught...

Is anyone else having a problem with last year’s queens? We have 8 hives, and at first inspection, all made it through winter. One had turned drone layer, but the rest had brood and bees. We were looking forward to an epic OSR crop, and all was good. At the most recent inspection, the...

We dealt with the psycho colony yesterday, and as ever, I took a lot of stings and had several bees wriggle into the suit. The good news is that the psychos are hopefully merged onto a nice calm queen and everything will calm down. I've decided I need a new bee suit. One that has trousers...

We did a quick inspection yesterday, mainly to retrieve queen excluders, apigard ekes and to check everything over for the winter. It was a pretty quick inspection as the weather was a bit blowy yesterday afternoon. 6/7 hives have capped "winter bees" in large quantities (good!), and 3/7...

I'm sure there's someone out there who can help me! Chatting to a very elderly local resident, She described how a field adjacent to the meadow I keep my bees on, as being mauve in early spring as orchids flowered. Now, sadly long gone, the lovely lady is in her late 90's What are the orchids...

It would appear that my bees have not been reading their books again. About 4 or our hives had part-filled / uncapped supers at the inspection last week, and very light brood boxes. Given that we want to get the hive volume down for winter, it would be better if the stores were in the brood...

This season I ran out of nuc boxes. When I say "ran out", I mean that I needed some, and my one spare box was in use. I simply wanted more chances of getting splits from "good" (nice tempered, productive) hives so that I could re-queen my more bad tempered hives. I looked at some popular...

I am stumped on this one, any help gratefully received. We had a colony that went Q- at some stage between October 2010 and March this year. Apart from that, the colony wintered well. When we realised they were Q-, they got an entire super of brood (eggs + larvae + sealed) merged onto them...

I'm going to find out the answer to this question over the week-end, but I'll still ask, as someone might have a better idea. We extracted two and a bit supers last weekend. About 7 frames were too solid to extract - not rock hard, but too solid to spin out. The other frames were good, mostly...

Last weekend we were ASing one hive when another one next door swarmed properly. The one we were ASing was our biggest colony, and it must have been getting ready to go as there was a sealed queen cell. If we had left it a few more hours, they would have gone. The one that swarmed for real...

We've been selling last year's honey crop through the local butcher - all good so far, he's taken 60 jars and they seem to be selling nicely. He's getting several requests for "liquid" honey - people expect it to look like the stuff you get in Tescos. All our honey sets pretty hard. The...

Here is quick way of dealing with Woodpecker damage - it takes about 5 minutes to fill a hole in properly, pretty much as good as new. No manky filler required. You will need: - A drill - Some hole saws, big enough to cover the hole, and within a few mil of each other. - A piece of cedar -...

I'm currently sorting though the spare kit, fixing the bits of woodpecker damage and giving the outsides of the parts a quick wipe with linseed oil. In doing this, I've discovered a few problems with frames (super and brood) that have overwintered. 1) A lot of the frames are quite mouldy...

I mentioned on another thread that I could post up some photos and explanations of how I make hive boxes and a few people thought it was a good idea. Once caveat: this method works for me, I'm not the best hive builder in the world (far from it!), but I'm probably not the worst either. Your...

Regular forumites will know of our frenzied artificial swarming (and real swarming) earlier this year. In the space of two weeks, we went from two colonies to 8, spent a fortune in Thornes and started to worry about next year. 2 months later the story is mixed. The two original colonies...

The big swarm that we got 2 weeks ago seems to be in trouble. - We got it out of the hedge 2 weeks ago and hived it. All seemed good, and they didn't run off. - Last week we lifted the crown board, and saw they were drawing out nicely, so left them to it - This week we have inspected...

I have a small problem with one of my colonies, it isn't a disaster, but it is becoming annoying. The bees are untidy. When presented with a nice frame of foundation, they will chew a big hole in it, then they will realise that they can build brace comb between the adjacent frames through...

Amid all the woes of swarms and associated disaster, how about some good news. We've got honey, lots of honey. We started with two nucs last year, they grew well and overwintered well. A month ago we artificially swarmed both (queen cells everywhere) and left the old queen + flying bees on...