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There is a great app for your smart phone called "Plantsnap" you focus on the flower which it looks up in it's database and hey presto ! And I have just used it on th screen image and is confirmed Epilobium hirsutum as "Codlins and Cream"

Has anyone intentionally or a accidentally united two hives without using either of the methods being discussed ? I am curious whether war really occurs, or we all believe in a legend we are too nervous to challenge. Thanks.

Do you have any support for this statement ? My understanding is that the size of the thorax prevents queens passing through the QE, and that includes virgins. Not the size of the abdomen. Thanks.

The content in this thread does not seem to follow bee physiology as we understand it. Could it be that there is a logical flaw from the beginning ? OP, could you please post some good pix of the "eggs" - no personal insult intended.

You can improve the odds by setting up a 4 frame nuc with a protected cell as well as the main hive, so only one queen needs to get mated to solve your problem. Queen cells are cheap here (NZ$10) compared to mated queens (a lot more), so hedging bets could work well. What are your prices like...

Here I find that using a protected queen cell works well and there is no need to find the incumbent queen. The newly hatched queen acts as the "assassin" and dispatches the old, and after 9 weeks all of the previous generation of bees will have gone. Interestingly, some hives become much...

Yes, one of the signs of a small or virgin queen is that the legs are too big ...

Thanks, I did not know that it was from your hives. Here I pass on about 30 swarms each year to our team of "Swarmers", and most are "foreign" as bee keepers don't call them in, of course, just handle them from their own hives.

It is recommended not to feed a swarm because there may be AFB spores in the honey brought along. The adult bees use the honey for drawing frames and they are not affected by the spores. If they are fed, the travelling honey is stored. We had a case of AFB in a hived swarm 3 years ago, and the...

In the Eastern states of Australia one can get Yellow Box (Euc melliodora) honey which is a very nice honey and not full of the taste of gum. And Leatherwood (Eucryphia lucida) honey from Tasmania is powerful and challenging, great on porridge. We don't import honey to NZ, so visiting my grand...

We can buy a Chestnut honey in New Zealand from New Plymouth, it must be from Sweet Chestnut as it comes in from the orchard during pollination. It's delicious and very sweet. And I have been sent a pic of pollen from local Horse Chestnut which is bright red, very pretty. Taken by Stephen...

If you are finding eggs this means that the queen is still in the hive (as of a few days ago). Part of the prodrome of swarming is that the bees reduce food to the queen to slim her down for flying, and she usually stops laying as a consequence. Unless there are lots of bees choking the hive...

If the QE is left in, is an exit needed for the drones as they hatch out ?

Thanks MartinL. I suppose, in my ignorance, I was thinking of a result of getting the bees into a hive so they could be treated for varroa in late summer and brought through winter. Rather than being locked in a box with the crown board plastered down by wild combs. Or are varroa not a problem...

This could be handled in the "cut out" method of getting the bees out of a tree, and a split ... Principle is to move all the bees into another box, and they need a queen, then the original queen and hive wither away. Steps: Move hive off. Put new box on site with one frame of brood and some...

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I note a great number of posts about swarming on this forum, so it is presumably very common. Apart from having good space management and young queens, which I am sure bk's do, is a cause that the bee stock is very swarmy ? Possibly because swarm cells are used for AS and splits ? Or does the...

Never occurred to me to use supercedure cells (is that what you referred to ?), I usually just leave the girls to sort it out. When using a ripe cell the timing must be about the same, the hive still has eggs from the incumbent queen and lots brood, and apart from opening to check for successful...

Using an unlimited brood box we have found that the Italian queens favour the beautiful pattern of brood, pollen and honey which are cuts across the nest, rather than the commercial methods which force the queen into limited space. And this method gives the wall to wall brood which the...

Hi icanopit, If the queen in the cell dies then the host hive queen is still going - if she has emerged then the money is on her winning. Immediate swarming control is not one of the goals of this procedure, and I think a swarm after requeening implied that the virgin had been beaten. Difficult...