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I rather suspect you'll be particularly assiduous with your swarm prevention measures this coming season, JBM. You wouldn't want to lose half of your colony, eh? ;) Cheers M

Yes, first class job done Sir: I salute you!

Nothing that a flat surface, a long hot wire, some glue and tinfoil wouldn't fix. A bargain indeed!

Do you know for certain how far down the trunk the cavity extends? A bit of judicious drilling might be advisable in advance of chainsaw action, if not, it being markedly easier to plug a little hole than to reseal a saw gash. Other than that, good plan and all the best!

One strip probably wouldn't do enough good to offset the risk of a failed supercedure attempt in the event the colony takes against their Queen.

There'd be no problem selling the honey, that's for sure! :)

Yes, let them sort themselves out. Chances are that they'll both remain until the new Queen gets mated and laying well, at which happy time the bees will very likely make a choice and stop feeding the Queen they no longer require.

I lost one like this a couple of years ago so I can share your pain as it were. There were plenty of bees and a box full of honey going in and all seemed to be as well as with the hive immediately adjacent. There was no disease in either of them and no outward cause for concern. I install...

A 2 litre plastic lemonade bottle with the tapered top cut off, inverted and secured in the body of the bottle to act as an ingress funnel, hung from trees around the periphery of the apiary and half filled withthe cheapest cola you can find. Works a treat and when loaded with decaying wasps...

Looks okay to me too. Remember that when the area of comb is limited it has to serve several purposes at once so there might not be as many cells available for brooding as there will be when they have more to use. If there's a flow on and they are using the income to fuel wax production...

Most of mine (that aren't in nucs) have been backfilling the brood nests for the last couple of weeks. They have plenty of super space and all but one have new Queens so I'm hoping that's the end of swarming for this year. Mind you, last year one lot tried to flit at the back end of August...

No idea but one of the little devils has moved into my workshop. Not content with lacerating her indoors' shiny new pride of place Rose, she's used the cuttings to completely fill the bore of the tailstock on my wood lathe! Just as well hive parts don't require much turning! :)

Thank you Karol, for a most informative and dare I say definitive post. Having been stung on the neck this morning and reacting in a way that's never happened to me after the innumerable previous encounters with bee venom, I'm printing this information out to digest and disseminate. Cheers

I know the feeling Enrico. I have 6 hives in one of my out apiaries at a country house that has a 3 mile avenue of mature lime trees. They sit at one end of it and I'm having to manufacture supers at a rate of 4 per week to keep up. The bramble is coming on hot on the heels of the lime so its...

Could well be from someone's chimney Derek. Are they sooty? :) Sounds like a good one: what's not to love about free bees?

Pretty much the way it went with one of mine this year. They had given me a super full before the osr and another full of osr before they started to make swarm cells. I popped the queen into a nuc and reduced to the one good cell after 6 days and left them to it. Another super full of osr a...

Yep, it happens alright. It happened to me earlier in the season, when a new queen flew into the wrong box and assassinated 40 quids worth of brand new buckfast, then proceeded to fill 2 frames with drone brood! Fence post time. From now on, I'm going to be sure to decorate the entrances of...

yep, same here, but they have been thwarted. some of them are now starting to contract their brood nests and have given up making qcs. I'm going to drop them down to 14 day inspections and focus on the tykes that seem intent on going for it. I think it's a combination of a roaring start to...

Close them in at night when everyone is home, then move the hive a few metres away and set it up on a preprepared new stand with the entrance facing 180 degrees from the original direction. Next morning, set up a new hive on the old site. Put at least 6 frames in there with a couple of them...

During the June gap, two of mine were as busy as ever and when the lid came off, a rather pungent, earthy aroma arose. The scent was coming from the supers and I had no idea what it was until, when standing up after the customary limbo shimmy under the electric fence, I came nose to umbel...