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Hi all, I'm about to go away for a year and although my mom (who's house is where my bees are kept) has said she will find someone to look after the bees, I should have done it myself. I have two hives, one is a fairly new lot arrived about two months ago, the other I have had a while. I tired...

Hi, I need to organise my bees as have let them build on frames without foundation and its hard to pull the frames out. The comb is also fairly old and laying pattern not good so would like to perform a shook swarm to help relieve varroa. What do I do with the left over brood comb and is there...

Hi, I have a really strong hive who have been doing really well since last year. They stung my visiting uncle yesterday twice on the face when he was about 20-30 ft from the hive. What kind of distance are bees normally territorial over? They got me twice in the face recently too. People ride...

Well, I had been squeezing by hand honey all day, had just tasted some and thought that it really was the best I had ever tasted.Back killing me. Got paranoid the dog might get into the honey bucket so was looking for something well out of her way. Picked it up by the handle with one hand under...

Hi, My recently arrived swarms brood is very patchy. Do queens sometimes take a while to settle? They are grumpy too. Got stung before I even opened the hive today!

Hi, I made two silly mistakes on Sunday. I gave the bees back the bubbly honey leftovers from my plastic honey bucket. I poured them into a jam jar and grabbed a twig and put it in. In hindsight, I have now contaminated the honey with a twig and also I saw lots I bees drowning in it when I...

Hi, Is it a problem if my dummy board is too thin or should I add a couple? I have a hive where I have thinned down the frames to 32mm and I am left with a space just too small for a frame.

Hi, Both my colonies are doing badly. One queenless and another only a frame of eggs. I needed to treat them with MAQs and was considering just putting the boxes together with MAQs. I remember u r not supposed to disturb them much before treatment. Do people think this would be a bad idea or...

Hi, When I combined two hives last week I had to remove some honey. I ended up with ten jars (my first ever). Now I know its exciting to have your first honey but it really tastes strongly of flowers. It reminds me of how hawthorne or elderflower smells. We have a lot of hawthorne and...

I kept my first hive when I was ten and had to stop because my mom was worried after talking to a doc. I used to swell like a balloon when stung. Then one autumn evening I went to feed syrup without protection and I dropped the syrup. The bees went mental, I was stung all over and my mom stayed...

I'm not sure what happened, I wan't going to use queen excluders but ended up wanting to. Anyway,I have the plastic yellow ones and the metal ones with holes punched in them (zinc perhaps?). Every inspection its a battle to settle them down without squashing bees…so I smoke them down. I have...

Hi, I just saw two supercedure cells in my hive with queen that had been split. The other hive has pollen going in just a week later and the queen cells in that one has just been capped last weekend. I'm worried that the queen somehow moved or got squashed? I added a frame of brood just incase...

Hi, When you want to get a frame out of the hive I have heard it suggested that you move the frames to the edge of the hive gradually. So when it gets to the edge they will fill if with pollen. Isn't it a problem taking their pollen stores? Thx

I'm no slouch, I regularly work 12 hour days, sometimes more. I have to say however that this hobby is such hard work! I seem to spend my weekends working now. I'm even too tired to write on the what I did in the apiary thread after a busy day. Apart from the actual inspections and manipulations...

Hi, I'm about to do my first ever AS. I'm good at spotting queens normally but have never been able to spot this one so she isn't marked. Tomorrow I'm going to really try again to find her and do my first AS. I only have one nuc spare. I have several full size hives and dummy boards available...

Hi, One of the perils of being a weekend beekeeper is that you can't control the weather. Next weekend is 10-12C but I've spotted queen cups. What do I do? Surely too cold to inspect?

Hi, I'm just wondering why people add a brood frame to the new hive when performing an artificial swarm? Surely this means no brood break and must be mean more varroa? Thanks

Is it a problem if my bees store lots of OSR in the brood? Will it set hard and be useless for them or is it just that beekeepers find it hard to extract when hard rather than bees. I know that hard fondant is difficult for bees to consume... Thanks,

Hi, I will have some honey this year. I'm not going to buy an extractor and despite trying to join the BBKA they don't seem to want me so…what kind of cloth do I order to crush my combs and squeeze the honey out? Michael Bush said in his book that this method worked for him for years. Any...

Hi, I have some frames which aren't Hoffman (self spacing) mixed in with my Hoffman frames….well to be precise one frame. I have stuck the plastic end spacers on the frames to space them out properly but it does not look like the same space between frames with the plastic spacers as would occur...