- Joined
- May 6, 2012
- Messages
- 857
- Reaction score
- 1
- Location
- grays, essex
- Hive Type
- National
- Number of Hives
- 6
continuing on from my older post, Im now getting ready to set up an out apairy in our woods, have found a couple of spots that look ideal, will be making up our mind this weekend, cutting brambles out and setting up some dead hedges, someone mentioned trouble with badgers, has anyone else with hives in the country had a problem with them??
we have urban badgers where we live and never had them going for the honey
I bought some old commercial hives last year for this very reason, but until now they have been sitting in the shed, I added varroa floors to them, and have permanently screwed on the mouse guards as we have both field mice and wood mice over there, these also came with a total of 15 supers, most had frames too, but no wax, so being the tight git that I am, I've order some foundation, but will be doing every other one on the frames, with the in between frame just having a 25mm starter strip, this way we can extract both jar honey and cut comb from the supers
I don't expect to get all four hives filled this year, but would be good to get one or two.
also having watched some you tube clips of the rose hive, I like this idea, it seems the bees (which know best) are left to build how they want, not how we think they want, so I may just try running a commercial like a rose, having this amount of supers
in front of our boundary we have a field with pond and meadow flowers, beyond that just fields, and within the woods, bluebells and other flowering stuff,
I'll add pictures/video's as they come along
we have urban badgers where we live and never had them going for the honey
I bought some old commercial hives last year for this very reason, but until now they have been sitting in the shed, I added varroa floors to them, and have permanently screwed on the mouse guards as we have both field mice and wood mice over there, these also came with a total of 15 supers, most had frames too, but no wax, so being the tight git that I am, I've order some foundation, but will be doing every other one on the frames, with the in between frame just having a 25mm starter strip, this way we can extract both jar honey and cut comb from the supers
I don't expect to get all four hives filled this year, but would be good to get one or two.
also having watched some you tube clips of the rose hive, I like this idea, it seems the bees (which know best) are left to build how they want, not how we think they want, so I may just try running a commercial like a rose, having this amount of supers
in front of our boundary we have a field with pond and meadow flowers, beyond that just fields, and within the woods, bluebells and other flowering stuff,
I'll add pictures/video's as they come along
We have badgers on the field cameras but they never bother the bees
