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Ooh that is odd, he makes a big issue about doing the second part on Day 9, so he must be looking through that box to find the queen, and he then removes the 2 frames of emergency QCs before replacing her with 2 frames of nest mates, just at the time they expect a queen. I wonder if any of his...

Wally Shaw describes a “modified Snelgrove” method (without any fancy board) in his swarming booklet for Welsh BKA. On the old site he leaves the new box with two frames of eggs and young larvae WITHOUT BEES so the queen is definitely not there, and she and the brood are moved a little way away...

Oh dear, have read the new poster more carefully - I see they plan to continue trapping within the 5km radius right up to November! That is one colossal amount of manpower, apart from the bycatch.

My understanding is that NBU are planning the brief surveillance trapping within 5km radius from previous mature nest. BBKA try to go along with NBU. That is aimed at intercepting recently emerged queens before they set off on their initial flight. After that we have another couple of months to...

Oh well. Perhaps mine are just inclined to be a little bit otherwise.

That’s good to know. Yes I agree the “forty litre experience” is important in a bait hive.

To avoid misleading the unwary, it may be kind to emphasise that two preconditions for using foundationless frames are 1) the hive must be perfectly level across all the frames so that combs, which hang vertically in construction whilst the wax is still soft, don’t hang too close to the...

R Dartington: there is plenty your members can be doing now. No need for them to be complacent. Most importantly, they can be signing up as verifiers for the NBU. For convenience, NBU will be contacting BBKA AHAT coordinators when they have a report of a possible AH sighting. (Perhaps non BBKA...

I can’t vouch for other BBKA articles, but I can truthfully vouch for the tracking guide as mentioned above, under AH resources. It is doable by volunteers, in the event of NBU being overwhelmed elsewhere, though of course we’d still need the services of an appropriate pest controller.

The NBU approach is to trap within 3 miles of a suspected (last year) nest that reached maturity and would have released new queens. The rationale is that hibernation takes place very close to the nest. On emergence the new queen feeds up rapidly before setting off on her journey of tens of...

R Dartington - It is encouraging that you are using good background knowledge to speculate, not just wild speculation. Having said that, please don’t use this in any talk to your branch. You would be misleading people with possibly severe implications later. Very soon the well researched second...

Yes that’s a good point, you could use a protein bait to keep bees away from it. But bait for ingestion would still kill European hornets and wasps, and it wouldn’t achieve the aim of killing the queen, as the custard would.

The link given by Mintbee on Tuesday, to the tutorial on making bait stations, is now out of date and Colin has yet to update the AHAT.org.uk website. He now uses a quicker method of drilling the hole, using a conical drill bit (a step drill). These were recently available in Lidl for £4.99 for...

If it did eventually come down to using fipronil, the point of the custard painted on to the thorax is that the carrier hornets do not ingest the poison, therefore they successfully manage to return to the nest. The custard is then groomed from them by others in the nest, and spread around, so...

Bettenham, if you see an AH on your bait as early as March, then it will be a queen so kill it (and keep, as you say, to report) right away. Any brood she has will die from lack of food, so there is no point trying to track a queen to her nest. In later summer, it will be only workers visiting...

Triangulation needs to be done with bait stations where hornets can come and go freely, NOT traps. Traps hinder tracking of nests. This a common problem, using the terms interchangeable. Bait stations and traps are two different things,

I hope your compost heap is downwind of the house!

I’ve just heard a good trick for courgettes that I’ll be trying next year. Once they really get going, cut down some of the plants quite low, to delay them, and that will spread the harvest of young fruits over a longer period. i think part of the no dig, or even dig less, rationale is that the...

I agree with the dash of washing up liquid - if you feel you need to trap, then at least you kill them a bit more humanely by drowning them more quickly.

Now red mite is something I do know about! (There isn’t much else!) A useful tip: In warmer weather, which is when they are most troublesome, they apparently mature from egg to egg laying adult incredibly quickly - as little as six days. Therefore cleaning the coop and applying mite control...