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Built around a poly box free from the butchers. Covered in thin ply. All I bought was the metal sheet for the tray, from screwfix for £5. The glass is single pane, 6 mm. Cut to size free by local glazier. Again I already had it. The one I made in the summer did not work very well, it was much...

I have been advising a very inexperienced beginner. He rang me ( he thinks it was 12/7/23) saying there were swarm cells ( sealed) and he could not see queen. ( I had marked her for him about 2 weeks before). I said to choose the best and knock down the rest. When I looked myself a couple of...

I hope that in the next 2-3 months I shall be moving to Ipplepen. I would like to bring 3 of my colonies with me. I am not keen on siting them in my garden, although that is possible at first. I am looking for convenient out apiary site. All suggestions appreciated. Thanks

For the last 10 years I have been very happy with this extractor. The only downside is having to keep pressure on the drill trigger while spinning. If I clamped the trigger to full on and plugged the drill into an electronic speed controller would this work, so I could gradually increase speed...

Just finished my extracting. Spoke to a friend yesterday who I introduced to beekeeping a couple of years ago, with his two hives. He told of his joy of extracting. I did nothing but moan. Those of you who have a decent number of hives, and extract manually might relate to my moaning about the...

Sent to me by a friend. I have looked no further yet than reading the article . Tautz has already done some of this work on bees " counting" and measuring distance...

Dani, If this is inappropriate please delete or move. I just want to say a big thank you to black Mountain honey for outstanding customer service. As I have already posted, my wife got me two new queens for a birthday present. One looked good but the other was smaller. Both were laying a week...

Bitterly disappointed. Just checked the take on my queen rearing and it is 0 out of 20. I was very confident as for the first time I used a big illuminated magnifier, so was confident about larval transfer. I used Dave Cushmans Cloake board method. Setting up on day 1 putting unsealed brood in...

My wife, bless her, not knowing my opinion on importing bees, has told me she has ordered two buckfast queens for my birthday. Until now I have reared my own queens, selecting from the best and culling the worst. So my bees are mongrels. My current bees are all very gentle. I have heard...

I have one hive outside my apiary and that is at my friends animal sanctuary. This hive is not inspected that often due to the people and animals about . Last opened about 10 days ago and they were vicious, particularly attacking the Llamas, so closed up quick, after establishing no brood in...

I have a strong colony that I am sure has a DLQ. A few capped worker brood, but lots of drone in a solid laying pattern, in worker cells. Not a lot of adult drones yet though. Eggs and young larvae, so I know she is in there, but they are quite bad tempered now though . Thankfully only on...

I have often read about this but not seen any proof. Today I went into my queen rearing colony ( Cloake board) to put on hair roller cages - day 14. 2 days after grafting I had gone in to check on acceptance, and left the cups in place for those that had not been accepted. Today those cells had...

I am using the Cloake board method to rear queens. The boxes are so full, the bottom box containing the queen is making swarm cells and some will be capped before my queen cells are capped. What is best course of action?

I need to transport a test frame. It will be out of hive for about 90 minutes. I will use a polynuc with a Ben Harden type fat dummy. I do not want the brood to chill. I thought of transporting it with bees on frame and shaking them off, back into poly ( with an empty drawn frame in) and...

Anybody got any more info? https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181004100044.htm Heard about this on radio 4 this morning and looked up the paper when I got home

Cannot find the answers in my books. Last week I opened my one out lying hive for first proper inspection. No brood whatsoever, good population of contented bees. Could not find queen. Put in test frame 4 days ago. No queen cells and no new eggs today. Eventually found a queen, who was on the...

For the last few years Roger Patterson has been talking about unexplained queen problems. I had not experienced this until now. Had my first proper look in my one out lying hive today, which is at my friends animal sanctuary. I had a quick look to check stores about six weeks ago and was a...

Have just seen that a lot of last years national honey show videos have been posted on YouTube. Just watched " basic genetics for bee keepers". It is hardly " basic" but is fascinating and he makes a very strong case for keeping locally adapted bees. This should please the BBKA and may cause...

Just learned a valuable lesson. Checked some buckets of honey whose water content was ok at time of extraction. Was gutted to see that some had crept up to 20.5 +. However after stirring up the buckets well and rechecking the values had dropped to around 19. I guess that the less dense honey...

Over the last few weeks several people have asked, " when do I do this or that?" Beekeeping is not done by the calendar. Our weather varies week to week, and what is right for the south of the country will not be right for the north. My best answer would be to do something when the bees tell me...