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Sorry to be a party-pooper but don't rely on this. Next door lost their three hens to a fox, despite the hens being "protected" by the husband's pee around the boundaries of the garden.

For the first year of bee-keeping, I used to let my hens wander around and under the hive stand (I built a stand with long legs), they would eat the dead bees on the ground, and bees and hens seemed to ignore each other. The second year - last year - was different. The bees sometimes chased...

Thank you, that's a good suggestion. I don't have a greenhouse but I could improvise a sort of cold frame and put the floor/super/CB/roof into it.

When my bees did that, I assumed that they were trying to get into the hive via the mesh floor. So, as I didn't want them staying there and getting cold and hungry, I pushed them all off gently with the inspection board as I inserted it and I kept the inspection board in place all the time and...

The super is nearly full of capped honey: I decided to leave all but two frames' worth (which I took before starting varroa treatment) to see them through the winter. I would put the super under the lower brood box except that I am a woman and that brood box is now too heavy for me to lift. I...

Thank you all. I have taken off the super with drawn, empty frames and wrapped them inside an unused thick plastic rubble sack. (I had already taken out the queen excluder.) I'll have to freeze them one by one, if possible: am not sure at the moment if the freezer (in a 'fridge freezer) will...

The bees drew out nearly all the frames in this super but did not put anything in them. Should I leave the super and frames on the hive - the hive already has two brood boxes (two colonies combined) and a super apart from this super - or take it off and keep the drawn frames indoors over the...

My hives are located at the end of the garden, near the chicken run and small goldfish pond. Normally, I hold the inspection board over the goldfish pond and scrape off the pollen and bits for the fish to eat. Have done that for 18 months. All fine. Until this year I scraped off the...

Your de haut en bas lecturing response seems to suggest that you keep forgetting that I am a new to this, being doing it for barely a year, and in fact I didn't get my bees until the end of June last year. Also, I do work hard at being self-deprecating on Internet forums - not a bumptious...

Small clump of bees under first hive First noticed this morning, a small clump (slightly larger than a man's fist) of bees on the underside of the inspection board. None "bearding" the front of the hive. Is this perhaps one of the two new queens having been chucked out with a few "loyal"...

Hi, can you post a photograph? It sounds like "wild comb" - some colonies (like mine when it started) have a propensity to fill up any space, not just draw out the frames, eg creating their own "frames" of comb stuck to whatever is above like the roof. They can do this incredibly quickly: I...

Yes, what you have done sounds reasonable to me. Good luck.

Poor poor thing. It does sound as if you will have to bath her to get rid of the bee sting "smell". I am on the Omlet forum too (different ID name). She will probably love being bathed.

OK, if we have a warm day I will look in the second hive. The queen cell might just have been an over-sized drone cell. This afternoon, it looked as if some of the brood that was capped when I moved the frames last weekend has hatched: they were coming out in threes, fives and tens, and flying...

Thank you for the kind offer, Karin. I gather that you helped one of the other people on my course who had two swarms over last weekend. I haven't yet got around to joining a beekeeping association. At present, I seem to be at the point where I should leave the first hive closed for three...

Sorry to hear about your chook. My hives are positioned so that the bees have to fly up and over the fence, in the opposite direction to the chicken run which is 8-10ft behind the hive. Normally I don't see any bees near the run. When I am supervising their daily free-ranging, my hens forage...

8 May, my hive swarms. 9 May, I remove 38 swarm cells. 12 May, I think I managed an unplanned A/S with one queen from a swarm cell (so I plugged the entrance of the new hive with plant material and will remove it after 48 hours by which time I hope she has forgotten about swarming)C. 13 May, two...

The first swarm stayed around on that tree for three days and then disappeared. I don't think they returned to the hive. This afternoon I found on the top of a brood box frame one swarm cell that had been opened and resealed. I detached the cell from the frame and, instead of throwing it in...

That is my experience: 35 of the 38 swarm cells were on the edges of the half-brood super frames.

I destroyed only swarm cells. I saw no queen cells on the face of any frame. There was one cell which looked as if it might be the start of a queen cell, on the face of one frame, so I made a mental note of where that is and will look at it again on Friday.