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We inspected our hives last weekend and found that one colony which is on double brood was jam packed with bees, and although we could not see any queen cells or cups there was a lot of drone brood dotted about and on an entire side of one frame. We added some supers to give them additional...

We have lost 2 out of 7 colonies to what appears to be Nosema this year. Certainly the tell tale signs of Nosema are on the frames and there was plenty of stores, but the two colonies have died out. This is the 4th year that we have had colonies across the winter and this is the first time that...

We have 5 hives, they are about 2m apart from each other. In the last week or so we have noticed that we have been getting a lot of defensive/aggressive followers that take a bit of getting rid of. We have been walking over 100m from the hives to loose them. Today we were met as we approached...

We decided to use some thin unwired foundation and see what honeycomb was like. We were advised to freeze the frames in case there were wax moth eggs in the frames, which we did. Is this good advice and what most people do? We have now got round to cutting the honeycomb from the frame and...

At the end of August we took off the supers and spun the honey and it was a light to medium colour and was fairly transparent - jar on the right.. A couple of weeks later we were setting the hives up for winter and in order to reduce one hive to brood and a half, we took away an almost full...

We have added some frames of unwired thin foundation to some supers so that we can have honeycomb. Another beekeeper, who also does this, mentioned to us that you should freeze these frames for 24 hrs as wax month eggs if laid can develop in to larva, which would be really unappealing, also...

This is only our second year of beekeeping into the summer. Last year we don't take much honey off of the hives at all, but this year its much better and we now one hive with getting on for three full supers. We decided to check on this hive this morning before 8am as it was nice a cool...

The area where we currently have our hives is due to be developed and we have been looking for alternative sites. We have been offered a lovely site by a farmer to use as an apiary. The only potential downside is that our two current locations are very secure, and we have never worried about...

I have a couple of hives which are getting towards 2 full supers. I am prepared to put additional supers on however I am now required to be abroad with work for 3 to 4 weeks. My partner is small and cannot lift a full super. While I am away is there any downside to her removing capped honey...

Hello, We have a colony who were problematic last year, despite our best efforts they never really built up their numbers. They came through winter OK, but now appear to be queenless. We did not see any new brood a couple of weeks ago and have put in test frames with eggs twice now, and they...

I have seen a lot of posts about feeding fondant through the holes in a crown board, or laying it on top of the frames, and I have also read posts about stores being too far away from the cluster and bees staving even though there were ample stores in the hive, which brings me to my question...

I had some assistance from a more experienced bee keeper yesterday to find and mark our queens. In one hive that was just single brood and a super, we could see lots of eggs, young larva and sealed brood, but could not find the queen. We even tried shaking the frames through the excluder. When...

We had a hive swarm in April and left a couple of the capped queen cells that were left in the hive to hatch to hopefully re-queen the hive. The weather has been awful so on the 10th May we out a test frame in the have and when we looked 7 days later (17th May) no queen cells had been raised on...

We did a colony split last week, and when we inspected the queen-less brood box today there are emergency queen cells as we expected/hoped to see. We have removed 5 queen cells and left the two largest and most sculpted. I have read conflicting accounts on if we should leave 1 or 2 queen...

I have inherited a couple of hives form a beekeeper who has moved out of area. I have been told that all of the brood box frames are on standard foundation, and there is not a 'drone frame'. Is not having drone frame a problem? If you don't have larger foundation for the bees to raise drones...

We have 'inherited' a colony that are currently set up as double brood box. The brood boxes could do with some maintenance, and I have some spare brood boxes that I could swap this colony into, but before I do this I just wanted to see if anybody had any advice or warnings about this. I am...

I made a batch of thymol solution following the instructions from the Norfolk Honey Company The solution that I didn't use on the day I stored in an air tight jar. This was about 2 weeks ago, when I went to use it tonight it has a thick crust on the solution. Is this normal? Is it still...

At the end of July our smaller colony which was given to us as a small swarm ended up with a drone laying queen and we were advised to combine this colony with our other colony which was also a small cast swarm, but which had been steadily growing in size. We combed using the newspaper method...

I was checking on our bees as we have recently reduced the hive entrance as there are wasps around and its not a huge colony. We are also aware this this is robbing season, although I don't really know what we do to combat that other than reduce the hive entrance. Anyway, I became aware of two...

We have two hives that are about 3m apart. We have just found that that the newer colony, which we got as a small swarm at the end of June has a drone laying queen, and she has now been removed from the hive. We are uniting the colonies using the newspaper method. Having not done this before...