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Good to see you back!

Sounds like you learnt a lot in your first year!! You can’t beat getting hands on as much as possible when you are starting out.

Hi Michael, I remember you talking about this at the Nihbs conference earlier in the year. I will do some more research on the techniques involved!

That’s a really interesting post Steve. Thanks for the insights. I think for our Queen rearing group we‘ll keep going with Apideas so that everyone gets to grips with those skills as a group and then individuals can experiment with different techniques at home. The more exposure you have to...

Tha That’s great to hear!! If you hear any more updates please keep me posted. Even if it’s a PM

There are definitely areas of the UK where there are wild living colonies that have learned to live with Varroa. Beesnaturally has many posts talking about his own experiences with treatment free. He knows what he’s at. To a far greater degree than many on this forum that think they do. The...

I think we can see that playing out with Varroa resistance in Ireland. Although resistance is maybe the wrong term. ‘Living with successfully’ is maybe better. The main factors allowing so many beekeepers to go treatment free here I think are. A stable population of a single subspecies...

Thank you for the suggestion. Definitely helps to get different insights. There will be a good bit of planning done over the winter for next season

NIHBS gave our group a couple of poly queen rearing nucs but we didn’t use them. Just didn’t get around to it. The big thing I would say is that queen rearing with Apideas is quite time intensive unless you have a big pool of people working together to share the jobs. It was hard fitting this...

Personally I would take ‘unimproved’ over Buckfast any day. To each their own I listened to a regen-ag podcast recently where a retired citrus grower was talking about his life in the industry. His family runs one of the only organic citrus farms in Florida. He told a story about how the...

If it’s not big numbers of queens you need I think a two frame nuc is the way to go. An apidea can fill with brood quickly once a queen has mated - you can expand it by taking out the feeder and putting in more frames. You can then add a super for more space. I know people that do this and...

I don’t have big problems with chalk brood. I think selection helps a lot here. I have some slightly different thoughts on chalk brood overall though. I think trying to eradicate it completely is very difficult in a cold damp climate. Any I ever see seems to correlate to climatic conditions.

At the 36 minute mark there’s discussion of groupings of bees around Ireland by genetic markers. That suggest local adaptation

An older one

Just to boil it down - if I was working on my own I’d use two frame nucs for sure. Just to buy myself more room to manoeuvre time wise. You just need adequate resources to make up the nucs - but you also need resources to make up apideas. Just less

Learning to manage apideas is a bit of a faff. Grafting and raising cells is the easy part in many ways. I guess like anything it will become second nature. So what our group did was to have an apidea set up with fondant in the reservoir. Then we’d shake nurse bees into a plastic bowl - give a...

My preferred method of queen rearing is to induce a colony that I am very happy with to produce queen cells. Then distribute the naturally raised cells amongst double framed nucs. This method is relatively resource heavy but is great if you want to produce the best queens in small numbers. My...

I’m sorry but none of that is accurate. If you read the paper I linked above it looks at some of that information although it is not the main topic of the study. I can supply you with more papers that look at the genetic diversity within the Amm population in Ireland. Or better again Dr. Grace...

It was a terrible year for beekeepers in the part of the north west of Ireland where I live. Really cold overall with a lot of rain and few foraging days. On top of that I decided 2024 was the year to set up an Amm Queen rearing group. In the end the skills I learnt grafting and managing Apideas...