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About as good as you can get with the tangential swing cages. It gets a good amount of partially granulated honey out too. I originally bought it for spinning out agitated frames of heather honey but have ended up using it for everything its so good.

I'm not sure about individuals, its bound to transfer with successive waves of absconding bees, but the chances are the receiving colony already has endemic dwv anyway, its probably more about tipping points at the colony level.

Quite likely, depends on the base rate of varroa infection your bees started with mind. The other side of the coin is that you might have neighbour's scratching their heads wondering where this sudden varroa influx has come from as your colonies collapsed🤔

The majority of relatively vigorous adult bees do actually abscond* in most cases of varroa collapse. As the morale of the colony fades the scent becomes less and less attractive to returning foragers and so they find their way into more attractive hives, hence the whole domino effect as they...

It doesn't look like foul brood to me, looks more like a virus epidemic, those hatching bees with their tongues poking out is the classic look of varroa collapse. Maybe too little too late with treatment or domino effect of other collapsing colonies in the area.

Not this 'energy', just a scientific fact, bees are electrostaticly charged hairy creatures which will collect lots of airborne particles inadvertently just by flying around. When they arrive at the hive these particles will be processed by house bees and be a part of the bee bread and honey...

I have a lyson 20 frame, nothing wrong with it but its not been used for several seasons now, its just kept as back up. It was superceded by a konigin 8 frame swing cage extractor, which takes 16 super frames, and is a brilliant bit of kit in my opinion, it spins out over a thousand supers a...

This, I think most beefarmers are asset rich and cash poor, if I payed myself the value of my work in comparison to what I pay the staff then it would be totally unsustainable. Add to that the fact that the bulk of the valuable assets (the bees themselves) can drop dramatically to virtually...

Spontex tough?

Its a fascinating approach but the main gains of it are keeping labour costs down if teams are travelling to distant apiaries to do everything needed at one go.

I hadn't realised they could breed

I've got dozens of mini plus hives with feeders on top and each divider has a polythene crown board stapled to it with holes for access to the feeder in the appropriate place and then loads of spare sheets with similar holes for when the dividers come out, also correx dummy boards. I think these...

I use a bit of polythene sheet as a crown board for the mini plus hives, makes everything a bit easier to open, the central divider only comes off for uniting the sides ( and other boxes) at the end of the season once the queens are harvested. I'd never try and pry the dividers up by their...

Gruff's done a great job with that interview, I really enjoyed it and plenty of food for thought.

That's ivy pollen

Cgf's is quite right, colonies with july + mated queens are far more likely to carry drones, some into the next season.

I've only now finished harvesting and am now doing a round of vapeing for instant hit and oxalic/glycerine strips for a lingering effect, I simply cant get around everything for 3 x 5 day repeated vapes. I'll probably do another vape all round before Christmas to make sure they start off...

I've been looking at these

Great list. My favourites to add would be to make sleds go faster (had some lovely boys clean me out of wax for this purpose one market)and to lubricate valve radios

Really good technique to fill odd sized frames or move bees from frame formats no longer wanted, I've done it several times, never enjoyed doing it and have felt a bit of a lunatic but c'mon, its a viable manipulation in some circumstances.