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Sensitive subject I'm sure, but.... We seem to recall that the rough price of a pound of honey last year was around about £5-£6. Whilst I've not seen any ultra local honey on sale in any of the shops yet, the fairly local stuff seems to be going for around about £4.25 - £5, or the...

Last Sunday I put the first tray of Apiguard on my hives, when I got to the last Hive I saw 3 loaded Queen cells ~ short of time before sunset I destroyed them & put the Apiguard on. Now I have a conundrum! Do I leave the hive alone for a second week as suggested with the Apiguard & risk a very...

We've extracted our supers, and now want to get them cleaned out by the bees. previously putting them above the crown board as I was taught the bees have not cleared them (even gave up & left them loose on the lawn to be "robbed" clean. But I know this is a very bad thing to do). So any...

OK, not my suggestion, but thought I'd run it past the forum. Would it be sensible to store supers on the hive? In other words, put the super above a closed crown board. Would it be sensible to store supers on the hive during Apiguard treatment? If not, why not? (I believe that it would...

We've had problems in the past getting the bees to clean out the extracted supers or taking down unextracted honey. We have always put the supers / unextracted comb above a reduced crown board, however whilst the bees do go up, they don't seem interested in taking that honey down. Any...

We know we need to make sure we've got all our supers off before treating for Varroa. However our hives are fairly packed and I'm conscious that we are removing space. We don't want to delay treatment too long - we left it too late last year. Is removing the space going to be a massive...

It's obviously harvest time, so supers are coming off hives for extraction. This may well be a dumb question that I must have slept though during any lectures, but my question is: Given one of the reasons you add supers is to give the bees space, and given you are potentially taking a brood...

We found this grub on our varroa floor today. Any suggestions as to what it might be?

We have just found out our (what was) buckfast queen right 14x12 we did an A/S on last week is now Q-, with a number of emergency queen cells and no eggs. I'm guessing the queen might have been squished or sodded off somewhere... There are a number of pretty hopeless looking emergency queen...

We bought a steam wax extractor last week and I had my first opportunity to test today. It seems to work pretty well, and extracted the wax quickly and cleanly once going. However I had been told that one of the bonuses was (and this was the reason we went for this over a solar extractor) that...

ARGH!!! We've carried out 3 artificial swarms over the last month or so (first on the 26th, and 2 (3 way split of 1 hive) on the 30th). The queen-right colonies are fine (well, doing as you'd expect - 1 with supersedeure cells which we did another split of today). We've made 1 fatal mistake...

:hairpull: How much spare kit do you keep to support X number of hives? Last year (second season) was a bad one for kit for us, in that, whilst we had some spare kit, most of it was all still flatpacked as the QC's were being capped or swarms were disappearing out the door, so it was a mad dash...

We're now far enough into our beekeeping cycle to have a couple of batches of frames that need cleaning. The wax has been extracted, so all we're left with now is the frame. Given how much "fun" cleaning brood boxes and supers is though, we realise how fiddly and time consuming cleaning the...

We have a hive with fairly dirty comb that ideally we'd like to do a comb change on. I thought we were aiming to do it at the beginning of next season, but it appears my other half was planning to do it about now. Coincidentally, we're also out of supers, and this hive needs a new super. I...

Despite the fact that there are bees in there, our bees don't seem to be drawing the top supers on the hives, despite the fact lower supers appear full. Any reason? Any way of encouraging them?

We're out of equipment. Well, more accurately, we're out of a roof (we have 1 floor spare, but a few brood boxes). I mentioned this at the BKA Barbie last weekend, and someone (the BKA chairman I recall!) suggested that It would be possible to keep 2 hives under 1 roof, if only for a fairly...

We need to do a split tonight of one of our national hives with charged QC's. Someone at work is looking for bees, however only has a commercial hive. In terms of our complete kit however, we only have a Nuc box left. We have a brood box, possibly a floor, but we're definitely out of roofs...

My other half carried out an inspection this afternoon on a recently A/S'd hive. It appears that the new queen is laying nicely, however the queen was easily found because it appeared that she was being crowded by bees. OH marked the new queen, and again when returned to the hive, was being...

We have an odd problem in one of our hives. Queen not seen, but made no more than a normal inspection so she might be there. no evidence of swarming, no queen cells or play cups. However we are seeing multiple eggs in the bottom of cells which seem to be developing as worker brood, not drone...