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  1. U

    Should capped frames be mved to the centre (just now)?

    Slightly plagiarising the title of another recent thread. I live in an area where some of my bees will easily and inevitably access ling heather. Last year I experienced a minor beginner-beekeeper trauma in trying to remove a smallish amount of some very viscous (but very tasty) honey. I had...
  2. U

    Adding honey supers ad infinitum

    Is there a benefit in increased honey production by restricting activity to regularly adding empty boxes to the top of the stack during the summer flow? Since I don't mind the hassle of repeated extractions, I tend to remove capped boxes from just above the brood-nest as they fill. The extracted...
  3. U

    How often do you check your hives?

    I was just re-reading the section of Tim Rowe's book (admittedly, not The Bible of Beekeeping) that deals with swarm-checks.. More than once he refers to checking every nine days. I had thought that in "swarm-season", assuming that you are very thorough each visit in your examination for signs...
  4. U

    Reorientation

    I've just moved two hives a distance of about 25 miles as the bee flies, so I'm currently resting a pulled muscle in my shoulder! This gives me time to think, which is always dangerous. ;) Obviously, those bees won't find their way back, will they? How do they know they have been moved more...
  5. U

    Do bees uncap stores and move it upwards in spring?

    This subject was touched on elsewhere and I'm not sure about the answers given. In a situation where they are becoming "honeybound" in a single broodbox and you expand the hive by giving an emprty box above a QX, I thought that bees would fill the new box only with freshly colllected nectar and...
  6. U

    Where to put the entrance hole in a nuc-box?

    Obviously (?) I'm planning for the entrance to go through the bottom of the wall on the short side, making it the (imprecisely-named), "cold way". I suspect that not many people would put it anywhere else and that recommendations to place it at the top or halfway up seem unlikely. But how about...
  7. U

    How many boxes do you need? Proportion....

    Regrettably, ;) even after finding one, wintering hive empty of bees, it's looking promising that I will have nine healthy colonies in the Spring. After accounting for the additional boxes I will use for increasing brood-space, I will barely have enough boxes to give them two honey-boxes each...
  8. U

    Scientists discover that bees keep healthier when kept warm

    In this revelatory study, researchers found that cold temperatures made bees susceptible to pathogens. Their hypothesis is that it may be possible to use medication to artificially boost the bees' production of a compound that is important for their resistance to disease. I know it's much more...
  9. U

    Capturing swarms from termite mounds

    It's not a challenge that I ever expect to face, but this beekeeper, who posts extremely long and detailed videos of "bee rescue" apparently from termite-mounds in coffee plantations, is so calm and precise in his technique in getting them into a box. He's provided me with a fair bit of my...
  10. U

    "Off the record" section and giving a Christmas bonus

    I've just noticed the section referred to above which appears to be available only to "Beekeeping Supporters " I hope it's the appropriate place for a question I have posed about a beekeeping supplier who may or may not be a bit "dodgy". Access to a private forum may be a very minor benefit of...
  11. U

    Any "Heath-Robinson" bodges for spinning out a bit of heather honey

    I had a strong suspicion that my bees were finding a certain amount of heather....we are in the Scottish Highlands after all. I was hoping they would mix it with other sources to make an extractable honey, and to a certain extent, they have. But the extracted frames still contain maybe 20%...
  12. U

    Will mites become resistant to oxalic acid?

    Rusty Burlew, on the Honey Bee Suite blog has this to say, "Lots of folks insist that mites cannot possibly become resistant to oxalic acid. Well, maybe. But just because it hasn’t happened yet, doesn’t mean it won’t. I put odds on the mites" I've previously gained the impression that in US...
  13. U

    Experimental, easy, Warre-style setup

    I like making beehive bits from PIR board. I've made many sleeves (winter "cosies") from the stuff and decided to adapt my technique to make something of Warre dimensions. It happens that poly, mini-plus boxes have an external dimension of 300mm, which is exactly the specification for the...
  14. U

    What is the best OA vaporiser?

    Opinions welcome. One of the reasons I have put off adopting vaping as my primary method of varroa treatment is that most of the applicators look a bit Heath-Robinson and that the apparently, better designed ones are significantly more expensive, whilst presumably doing the same job. Bearing in...
  15. U

    Honey production in Corfu

    On holiday in Corfu, we signed up for an hour's talk about bees and a tour of the production facilities of Panagiotis Vasilakis. It was the first time I have seen professional extraction and bottling machinery, and how amazing those machines are. Panagiotis started commercial beekeeping in 2001...
  16. U

    Uniting without queen exclusion

    Assuming that you are certain that the colonies being united have only one queen, is it essential, other than as something to support the newspaper, that you use an intact QX. Obviously, as soon as the paper is breached, the incoming workers have nothing to prevent them reaching the queen other...
  17. U

    How many hives hits the "sweet-spot"?

    Although only just over two years in, I've gone from one colony to ten. Seven of these are mature and producing this season. Three are building up from swarms, and I have a tiny colony in a mini-plus, which effectively is my "emergency" queen. Ten is just about manageable, despite taking over...
  18. U

    Loving the small dramas and serendipity of beekeeping

    Having a few healthy (and one unhealthy) colony(s) now makes me a bit more philosophical and less stressed when I mess up, (which is almost every day). Today I was puzzled to find some sporadic queen-cells above the excluder. One contained a dead pupa, one had a small larva and tickling the end...
  19. U

    Some observations two days after newspaper unite.

    I placed a Q+ hive above a hopelessly Q- hive two days ago. These had previously been separated about a month ago after I saw swarm preparations; so technically, this was a re-unite. The bees are through the paper and the hive entrance is much busier, but, unless something else has hit them...
  20. U

    Uncapping knife versus uncapping fork.

    Which of these has the greatest merit?
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