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In the last week or so I've extracted a handful of supers and am in the process of bottling it all up. Every know and then I see small black embedded in the jarred honey. I'm putting the extracted honey through a double strainer that supposedly has a 1.5mm and then 0.5mm mesh sizes, and as far...

I've a hive 14x12 hive that seems to be struggling to get beyond 4 to 5 frames of brood. Coupled with this is an increasingly feisty nature that's resulted in a bracelet of stings this afternoon. I've a second hive on 8x12 that's going gangbusters, currently filling a super/week and was...

Does anyone have any tips on how to clean the green jumbo feeders? My bees have decided to fill the voids on the underside, and the cones used to access the upper side, with large amounts of crystallised comb. I've hacked out as much as possible, but the dregs are proving rather difficult to...

I've got two hives in the back garden. Last weekend the larger had 7 frames of BIAS and 3 supers filling nicely. The smaller had 3 frames, and one filling super - the queen seems to have been quote slow to get going this year. Both of them have been packing in the pollen and nectar so forage...

I'm sure this is such a noobs question that I'm almost embarrassed to ask it, but.... Having just extracted my first ever set of frames, i was kind of expecting to end up with a bucket of clear liquid honey. But it's very definitely an opaque/cloudy liquid. The contents the poured out of the...

This is my first full year with bees, so forgive the numpty question that follows.... I have two supers on one hive where the bees have filled all the cells with honey/nectar. On all of the frames, only the top half of cells have been capped and the remaining contain liquid they're still...

Hiya folks, I preface this by pointing out that this is the first full season I've started having only overwintered a swarm i got last year. So... The last few days of warm weather have seen the hive come alive with activity and the ladies are piling on and out of the entrance. As things have...

One of the member benefit of BBKA related to Booker Wholesale. The info on the BBKA website isn't overly informative: The Booker website of fairly clear on them being for trade/business use only, and not for private indiviudal or the general public, so how have people found signing up as a...

Being a first year beekeeper, thoughts are now turning to what to do (or not do) over the coming winter. The hive seems to be okay from what I can tell in terms of stores and brood (roughly equal number of frames of each at last inspection), and they're still hauling in the pollen so mouse guard...

Walking near the hive this morning I noticed some debris on the ground outside the entrance, and what looks to be a load of wax fragment underneath the OMF. The debris looks (to my novice eyes) to be the husks of bees that don't appear to have successfully made it to adulthood, but I could be...

I put a board under the OMF of my hive last week and left it in there for 7 days given I was out of they country. What with it being a new hive that's expanding from a swarm nuc and me being a newbie, I thought it was a good opportunity to just see what the mite drop might be like. I think I've...

The nuc I got at the end of our beginners course contained a mixture of hoffman frames and also a couple with long plastic spacers on them - I guess that was what the person who captured the swarm had available at the time. The flat-pack hive kit kit came with small plastic frame spacers. So...

I got my hands on a nuc about a week ago, and after sitting it in the hive location transferred the frames over into the hive proper (didn't see the queen mind, but I think I got all the bees in). Following the advice given by my local BKA I added a feeder above the broodbox and have left well...

Had a go at lighting the new smoker for the first time at the weekend - suppose I'd better get some practice before any bees turn up... A sheet of red top rescued from the recycling box, a few torn bits of pizza box from the same, and then a few handfuls of wood chips freshly prepared by...

I had a new smoker arrive today, all looks fine to my novice eyes, but in amongst the bubble wrap was a small bit of bent metal (see below). I've no idea what it might be for, or whether it's even part of the smoker. Any ideas?

So, I've made the rookie mistake of dry assembling the mesh floor and entrance part of a new hive and then must have got turned around when banging the nails in and am now the proud owner of a bee hive base that could double as the foundations of the leaning tower of pisa! :banghead: Is there a...

Newbie here, so forgive the numpty question... I've built a couple of hives and populated them with frames/foundation and they're currently sitting in the shed while finishing off the hands-on bit of the beginners course. But, they are taking up rather a lot of space, and getting the lawnmower...