I need some advice please…

Beekeeping & Apiculture Forum

Help Support Beekeeping & Apiculture Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
I've really enjoyed reading this excellent discussion. Thank you all.
It's a great forum - always plenty of opinion, loads of knowledge and advice given freely - I don't think there is another forum that is as active on the planet - always someone on here day and nighty.
 
confirm who it was
Latest tip from Roger Patterson is that Annie Betts may have invented the phrase. She certainly fits the MO as she edited Bee World between 1929 and 1949, wrote 170 articles, published research into bee fungi (among others), and in-between, as an aeronautical engineer for the RAE at Farnborough, published Empirical Formulae for a Variable Pitch Airscrew, with Applications to the Prediction of Aeroplane performance (1919) and The Effect of Variable Gearing on Aeroplane Performance (1923). Only slight blip to this stratospheric success is that she admitted to being v bad at housework, but who cares, what a star!

If you fancy a day out, JBM, her correspondence is held at the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth.
 
Another possible might be MG Kennedy-Bell, not actually certain that she wrote for the journal but she probably did as well as doing a sadly lost BBC radio series.
 
Thank you. Makes sense.
Hello, we have a week of good weather ahead of us, though the temperature dips a little toward the end of the month.
Am I right to go in and locate the queen whilst weather is good this week or should I wait till spring is fully here?
 
Need to make sure she’s in brood box and put QExclider on so if she’s been laying in super it can clear itself over next few weeks … see above thread…
Temps are set to be very nice, especially mid week, in these parts, forecast is possibly eighteen degrees on Thursday. You need to go by conditions in your location and what you intend doing and why, what you have in mind is not at all unreasonable AFAIC.
If your supers are on and they contain brood, it's a pretty quick and easy job to run through the frames to see if she is there. If she is, pop her in the brood box and continue with your plan.
 
Need to make sure she’s in brood box and put QExclider on so if she’s been laying in super it can clear itself over next few weeks … see above thread…

That can wait then, weather is still pretty much up and down at the moment, and even if the bees start bringing in nectar - all they will do is store it up top thus pushing the queen down on to the deep frames anyhow. so they are doing the job for you, with no need to fiddle.
Remember, if the brood nest and cluster in the super is fairly small, by putting the queen below the QX you risk the cluster abandoning either the queen or the brood. Neither of which you can afford at this time of year best not to listen to those who forever pressure the beginner beekeeper to do something rather than just sit back and let the bees do what they're good at.
 
My thoughts were much like JBMs, once they get some decent income they will preferentially store it above the brood, thereby slowly lowering the brood nest to where you want it.
I'd wait until it's warmed up properly in your situation.
 
Back
Top