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My bees swarmed a while ago and I left them for as long as I could to create a new queen. This didn’t happen and I now have laying workers (all drone, multiple eggs, poor laying pattern etc). I’ve read many options to resolve this but opted for the ‘introduce a frame of eggs/larvae every few...

Im pretty sure my main hive is now queenless as no sign for a long time and no brood or eggs now. Lots of bees though I picked up a swarm last week which is strong and just about fills a 6-frame national nuc (which Ive just transferred to a hive). My delimma is what to do now. It makes sense...

So I remember from beekeeping classes a long time ago that if you shake a frame of bees, either the nurse bees or the worker bees come off on the first shake It being more than a month ago, I cant remember which one it was?! Can anyone fill me in?!

I did a beekeeping course many years ago. I seem to remember at the time that you should always keep a couple of frames of stores in the brood box. My situation now is that I have a 12 frame brood box and queen excluder and 2 reasonnably full supers on top. The brood box has 10 frames FULL of...

I have now removed the honey and am feeding the bees. Just before I took the honey off, I noticed that every weekly inspection, I have one charged queen cell at the bottom of one frame which I removed. Since then, I have continued very brief inspections and every week, there is again one...

I took the OSR off in May, these guys are busy! I have left supers in the house for a few days in the past prior to extracting and it’s been fine. Would you expect a longer time to be a problem?

I’m lucky enough that my bees are just filling their 5th super! However, for the weekly brood box inspections this means I have to take off 5 REALLY heavy supers before I can get to the brood. I’m thinking of clearing he bees off and and taking off the top 2 supers. I have an extractor booked...

I’ve recently moved my hive to nearby some oil seed rape so I’m keeping a very careful eye on the state of the flowers which are pretty much over where we are. I’m planning to remove the supers this week and spin the honey pronto as all the advice suggests. One thing I normally do with honey...

ok thanks, board will be coming out! When Is varoa monitoring time??!

I have a new ish hive of about a month old which I used to do a split. Today I examined the Varoa Board which is underneath the open-mesh floor and found it really wet. It hasnt been raining here (Surrey) and the hive is in open ground so dont expect and drips from anything. Im a bit puzzled...

I had a super under my brood box for the winter. Bees were fed with fondant and when examining hive, there are stores in the under-super. I was always taught that the golden rule is never to feed with a super on. Any advice on this and given that I fed the bees fondant for the winter, can...

I took a peek inside my hive today for the first time this year and to my great delight, it is packed full of bees, brood and stores. I decided to 'under-super' for the winter on local advice which meant a super full of drawn comb underneath the brood box. I swapped the brood box and super...

Im currently feeding my bees 2:1 sugar solution which they are getting through at quite a rate. I checked them yesterday but the sugar solution in the feeder really didn't look right. I last filled it 4-5 days ago and when checked yesterday it was still 3/4 full. The sugar solution has...