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I have a hive with only a few frames covered although there is a laying queen. I want to move it into a nucleus box for the winter. What is the best time of the day to do this?

I carried out a split on my single brood box national hive 9 days ago by placing 3 frames of bias ( and nurse bees) in another national hive with two frames of stores and two of foundation. There were no queen cells in the hive at the time of the split. Top feeder with 2:1 sugar soln added to...

National hive, single brood box, bias on 5 frames but still empty cells on most of these (half to a quarter of the area) about 3 frames full of mostly capped honey, a couple of empty, only slightly drawn foundation on the outside. New queen towards end of last summer. Bees flying in with lots of...

I have a swarm in a 5 frame nuc collected on 13th May from my own hive. It has been fed with two litres of 1:1 sugar soln. Inspected yesterday. Lots of drawn comb, not too crowded but no sign of eggs or larvae. Bees have been busily flying back with pollen whenever weather reasonable. Is this a...

I have two hives, both of which have swarmed, one on 12th May, the other on the 14th May. Both hives are brood and half and prior to swarms were storing honey well, in fact there were two supers on each although the second ones hadn't been used significantly. Frames are mostly uncapped. The...

Does anyone have any views on the Unimel 3 frame stainless steel extractor being sold by T*****s?

Did an AS 3 and a half weeks ago. Have inspected the new brood box(supposed to have the old queen in) three times over the last 5 days and have seen no queen or evidence of there having been one for at least 20 plus days ( I.e, no eggs larvae or sealed brood). I was about to add a swarm...

I have just collected my first swarm ( yes in the dark!). It came from my own hive and had attached itself to the side of our caravan. I have put it in a nucleus box as I had no full sized hives empty. It wasn't a huge swarm - about 12 inches diameter and an inch deep. Assuming it stays put is...

I carried out an AS on 21st April - a very strong hive on brood and a half which had already laid down about 8 frames of honey in a couple of weeks, some capped in the one super on the hive. The super was put back on top of the new hive (single standard brood) with original queen etc. The old...

How do I decide when to extract OSR honey and can it be extracted using a normal spinning extractor without heating it beforehand? How critical is the time window for extraction? OSR has been in full bloom here for over a week.

I have done the first stage of an artificial swarm today using the pagden method although have read at least 5 different variations in terms of relative position of original and new hives that it seems it isn't exactly definitive. I want to eventually reunite the brood boxes as I want to get a...

The weather has been mostly warm and sunny for the past week + and the bees are very active, certainly bringing in masses of pollen. They have consumed over a kg of fondant on each hive in just over three weeks. I haven't inspected yet as advice here seems to be leave it until end of March at...

Thought I would share this image. Felt a bit sorry for them. They looked exhausted as they threw themselves at the landing board. It was taken today at about 1.30 pm. Temp around 17 degrees. Does anyone have any idea what the pollen may have come from? Surrounded by pasture farmland and small...

I put on the second lot of apiguard treatment a week ago. I'm aware this treatment should last for two weeks. I worried I'm running out of time to feed. Would it be ok to start feeding now or must it wait another week?

What is the received wisdom? Should it be wet or dry?

When are they likely to stop storing honey? Just trying to forward plan for the next few weeks. Removing supers (actually only one sadly) extracting, varroa treatment, feeding; all tricky to fit in the diary. Live in Mid Devon in the midst of mainly pasture land. Lots of brambles though but...

When I looked at the tray today at around mid day there were lots (10-20) of tiny (less than .5 mm) light brown/orange insects scurrying around. Thy looked roundish but TBH they were so tiny I couldn't be sure. They were nothing like the dark brown varroa I have seen before. It's very hot -...

I split a strong hive four weeks ago so put two new frames in the existing hive (and added a dummy board) on the outside of the brood box to replace the frames removed. After I had done the split I decided the original hive had probably already swarmed. Small panic. No evidence of laying queen...

Have been so pre-occupied with keeping the bees in the hives I had sort of forgotten that I might need to get the honey out of the frames at some stage. Given that I'm not intending to get into industrial levels of honey production and will only ever have a couple of hives, what is the minimum...

I had a very strong brood and half hive of bees 2 weeks ago. I started with a five frame nucleus with new queen last July. They had built up well after the winter and had about three quarter filled a honey super. Because there were queen cells developing (about 6-8) I thought it was in danger of...