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So in our first year of bee-keeping we have two hives live now. The first one is our swarm which we collected in Jubilee year, now named Jubilee hive. It's a bit temperamental - by which I mean, we occasionally have to use smoke to move the bees. But none have 'pinged' us. The second hive...

Clever. We also have magpies but haven't seen them active around the hives. Our stands are about 55cm which seem slightly taller than yours. And we have grown wild flowers around the hives so that birds couldn't land on the ground except at the back where we stand. we are about to use...

Having gone through a 'lost queen' recently we took lots of advice on here and from our local BBKA members. We had no visible eggs (which is how we knew the queen wasn't around), but tiny larvae. We decided 'nature knows best' and left the bees to it. One week later we had 8 queen cells. We...

We had our supercedure and in our last post we had seen our new virgin queen. She wasn't a virgin for long as 10 days ago our hive was flooded by drones. Every other bee entering the hive was a drone and when opening the hive they were all over the combs. We didn't witness the mating flight...

lovely photo too!

It's amazing how quickly you get attached to your bee colony, and your queen. After having our swarm for around 4 weeks, we made our inspection 14 days ago. And there were no eggs. Very small larvae, but no visible eggs. So our queen had stopped laying, or she had left. We felt so disappointed...

This describes our situation exactly except we have only one hive. All going well, then last Saturday the colony appeared queen less. We checked again yesterday and they have around 8 capped queen cells. Our mentor says either drop the queen cells down to the 3 strongest cells, or let them sort...

I was talking to our BBKA secretary who has been out and collected 2 swarms today even though it hasn't stopped raining all day! Them bees - do what they damn well please, not what we expect them to do!

I'm also interested in what constitutes 'a few varroa' as we have found our first mites. We have a solid floor so don't know how to check for varroa on that floor. However, we removed some drone cells and found 3 mites on a clump of cells. We opened 3 other drone cells and found only one mite...

Thanks PeteinWilts The other hive is still waiting for its nuc (which according to the producer is taking time due to the weather) so we don't have any used frames yet. I wouldn't want one from another keeper in case of infection (or am I being precious?) We have been checking for those queen...

Hi all We have a very healthy swarm which we housed in our new hive on 16 May. The queen laid immediately and the brood chamber had eggs/larvae on 9 of the frames within 20 days. The other 2 frames are filled with honey (one capped and one still being filled). We added the super after this...

And so to our second inspection ever... We had the busiest Bee Sunday so far. Our 11am meeting of our local beekeepers association meant we started looking at Nick's apiary. How lovely to see the hive in which he had combined two small colonies. And then the hive from which he had removed 15...

first hive and photos

just done a quick check on the girls in the hive. And written my blog. Now uploading photos to blog but system crashed. Plenty to do instead of footy!

And so to our second inspection ever... We had the busiest Bee Sunday so far. Our 11am meeting of our local beekeepers association meant we started looking at Nick's apiary. How lovely to see the hive in which he had combined two small colonies. And then the hive from which he had removed 15...

This is going to sound weird, but there is a Haynes Manual on beekeeping. We are one month into beekeeping and it is full of pictures which really helps. But there is nothing like the real thing - beekeeper meetings, visiting apiaries of friends, going to the shows... that's where we are...

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