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I have several boxes of last years honey in storage. When I checked on them recently, there was a very large puddle of honey underneath the boxes. The majority of the jars seemed to have leaked - although they were also jarred up carefully. No jars had tipped over and I don't how the honey...

Checked my small hive with a collected swarm in. Three of the unused frames in the box were dripping with wax moth, horrible state, grubs everywhere. Cleaned it out and killed (hopefully) all the moths and grubs, and intend to move the brood to a new unused box tomorrow. I'll blowtorch the...

Title says it all I still have problems lighting my smoker and keeping it alight. Use wood chips after council cut down trees locally and left big piles of chips in hedgerow a few years ago. Dried them out for months in polytunnel before use. But what's the best thing to use? Fed up of smoker...

I believe I've caught a swarm in my bait hive. TO be honest, it was just an empty hive sitting in the apiary, but it now has bees in. But there doesn't seem to be any brood of any type, just lots of bees and honey. No sign of any queen, not that I'm particularly good at seeing unmarked queens...

Three of my hives became queenless, mainly down to my fiddling. One of the hives developed drone layers, the other two didnt. Despite several attempts to get them to raise QCs from frames of BIAS, didnt have any luck. So on 1st August, introduced three new queens. On checking today, only one...

I overwintered my national hive on two brood boxes, and have been feeding fondant until a week ago. I expected the bees to have moved up into the top box, to allow me to remove the bottom brood box. However, when I inspected them yesterday, the top brood box is completely full of stores...

Been away for ten days and had no-one to check my hives. Checking my two brood box national hive this evening, noticed the top brood box had at least 20 queen cells in it, both open, sealed and being built. Guess my bees must have swarmed whilst I was away unfortunately. Avoided the new...

What is the best time to strim around your hives? I strimmed around my hive at 9pm today, and within seconds the outside of the hive was covered with bees, and I had quite a few on me. Is this normal? I got on with it and got out of there, but what is the best time to do it? I thought if it...

I only started with beekeeping last year and need help. Has a one brood box setup last year, gave them a super on top (brood and half?) to move onto as I didn't have a second brood box, then QE and supers on top for honey. Overwinter took out the QE and left a super with honey to keep them...

I have two colonies I want to combine as one is very small and queenless (colony 1), the other doing better and saw the queen this morning (Colony 2). I know I need to put colony 1 (the queenless hive) on top of colony 2, with newspaper between so they can unite. But do I take out the queen...

Hi there. I am another new beekeeper. I use National hives and have just found capped queen cells in one of them. The brood box is very full of bees, with brood on all the frames. There were at least two capped off queen cells hanging vertically on the sides of the frames. Don't think the...