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Three hives - two Warre, one horizontal top bar - that were all well-stocked and apparently thriving when I checked them in November. Now still with many kilos of honey, and all full of dead bees. How do I set about figuring out what caused that?

I put it out late in April, and ten days ago I noticed that it was in use – a small swarm judging by the quite slow traffic in and out - and I assumed that the bee-pheromone equivalent of a 'sold' sign would send away any scouts from other swarms. Yesterday though, a sizeable swarm filled the...

I want to move one of my hives to somewhere about half a mile away. Difficult to move them directly, so I'm thinking to take them 'on holiday' far enough away that they'll forget this local landscape, then bring them back after a while. How long do they need to be away for?

My three hives – like every hive design I've ever seen – have the entrance at or near the bottom. I've noticed though, that if I give the bees any hint of an entry near the top (whether deliberately or through poor quality control in the woodworking department), they'll use that almost...

Right, it's a small colony that I hived from a swarm six weeks ago, they seem happy enough, on six or seven top bars, though they haven't expanded much since I got them. I thought I should treat for varroa, so I vaporised a gram of oxalic acid in the bottom of the hive, then removed the...

Back in April, I put out a few swarm boxes, that were shaped for easy transfer into my horizontal top bar hives. But over the summer, I built myself a Warré hive, and I'm now persuading a 'horizontal' swarm down into it. They've been in the box a few weeks, and are well-established on seven top...

Ok, bear with me on this, because I'm pretty clueless: Last spring, I ordered a package of bees (not the best way to get bees I know, but funds were limited), and put together a top bar hive (I may be an incompetent beekeeper, but I'm an ace woodworker). The bees came at the end of June, and...