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When he gets the opportunity to take a look, he can see if the queen is marked. :D

Nearly, you left out Mid Wales too.

I put out plenty of ideal homes and catch a few swarms, they mainly contain big, stripy orange bees from all those beekeepers who maintain they never lose swarms! :D

A pollen survey would have told you where the honey was coming from and what proportion could be attributed to the allotment.

Difficult to tell scale from the pics, but they look like two workers. The queen is much bigger (as you probably know, from seeing them appear in the spring after hibernation, looking for possible nest sites). The drones are somewhere between the queen and the worker, noticeably larger than a...

with some fava beans and a nice Chianti?

Oh, God bless him. RIP.

Two weeks doesn't sound very long to me. We had a hive kicked over and it was a long time before the bees settled. They did settle, but it was more than two weeks. Depends on how long you want to wait.

It sounds like the frames are in a bit of a mess. We've all been there though. The moths, larvae and spider webs are all related: Wax Moth. They'll move in on any vacant or abandoned frames and make a terrible mess. If the honey is still capped, then there'd be no harm in you using it, at least...

Just semantics. We're using naturally in completely different ways and setting, the bees, I imagine are fairly similar! :D I've never pressed my Queens or intensively fed, but they always move down in the summer, leaving stores above and then up into the available stores in the winter. There are...

Nope, Honey bees naturally move down. It's only in our artificial situations where empty boxes are placed above that they move up. Haven't used QEs for a long time. As others have said, it takes a bit of time, but we've had success by cutting and realigning the comb to fit the frames. We've...

But don't we just end up creating myths about myths? I know this isn't supposed to be a discussion thread! :D But the smoking myth, come on! Isn't it just horses for course? Yep, that bees gorge as a precursor to forest fire has been substantial disproven in the Australian fires, not too...

I'm afraid concrete would fair worse than polystyrene in terms of sustainability for me! :D

Binoculars are a good place to start. There's lots to see. They're lighter and cheaper. You can use them for bird watching too. :) I saw the 'Green' comet (fuzzy blob :D ) from the back garden a few nights a go before going to bed. Too late to get the telescope out!

St. Ambrose, patron saint of beekeepers! :D

Is this the Grumpy Old Man thread?! :LOL: Emphasis on MAN!

I've no axe to grid here, but if you are going to pile in an attack, then do it for the right reason. There's no disputing the underlying principle of Natural Selection. And where there is the isolation and enough beekeepers are on board, it is happening. Speak to the Mid and North Wales...

Oh come on people. Let's not get lost in semantics. 'Vaccine' is a general term for the introduction of some live or dead or modified disease in to a host to boost the immune system. In all the cases you have posted this has lead to immunisation. This is not the case for Varroa and as has been...

The laptop chargers might, depending on what output you need. Quick look at one of ours: 14v, 4a. Don't know if that is what is required, sorry.

There would be an argument that said that as long as you hadn't taken any honey from the late swarms, they should be able to collect enough stores to see themselves through the winter? If not, you are probably just propping up a weak colony anyway. Like elainemary, I just leave a super of honey...