Recent content by alisonfosterbell

Not clipped. But i will check if her wings are tatty when i go to my apiary the day after tomorrow. She is a 2022 queen so her days are numbered. I am waiting for a new red queen to come in a week or so. I'm not confident enough yet to rear all my own queens so i am buying in a couple to help me...

Ha ha! You were right! In fact there WAS my yellow queen in that clump and now safely in the nuc! So the swarm in an elder tree i caught last week..... was somebody else's?? I haven't checked for a queen in that one yet but will do so tomorrow as they will have had a week in peace. Thank you...

Thank you so much for your advice and encouragement! The OSR and hawthorn have gone over here, and the rain and hailstorms have done a lot of stripping of the flowers.The first supers are being capped so fingers crossed!

Hi Enrico! yes it's a mesh floor. The problem is that i dont think there is a queen in the hive as i think this hive swarmed (i think) a week ago! I caught a swarm that i assume might have been from that hive. But I am hopeless at spotting queens which makes things very tricky! So perhaps...

There was only nectar as far as i can see. So maybe undershot?

Here are some photos

Here in northern France it has been a wet and windy spring. With a job and the poor weather i have been late getting into my four Dadant hives. It is still wet but warmer now and I have been trying to manage swarming whilst i wait for some new queens to be sent to replace my elderly white and...

Thank you! It looks very interesting! I'm not too concerned about pollen coefficients and ratios but more as to the plants foraged. I would say 99.9% of my customers want to know the flowers! I note what is in flower each week by observation to give a broad picture. My bees and I live in the...

Thank you for your excellent advice!

Brilliant thank you! And where could i get an atlas of pollen grain shapes for identification?

Hi there is it possible with a basic light microscope to identify pollen types at home? I'd love to be able to say to my customers more precisely which flowers were foraged.

Maybe it was Bitter Honey from arbousiers ("srrawberry tree") ? It tastes of coffee, burnt caramel and liquorice! White flowers in corsica italy spain portugal. Stanley Tucci once did a programme with pig roasted on a spit slathered in this amazing honey!

Here in Picardy the ivy flowers are still tightly budded. At long last, we will have a week of summer weather: in the fields by my apiary are buckwheat, late sunflowers and phacelia.

A-ha perhaps you can advise me! A friend gave me a bit of her hop plant a couple of years ago. This summer it flowered for tge first time but...no cones! Just tiny flowers full of dusty pollen. Are these male flowers? How could this happen if its from a plant which has cones?

Hi there! I too am an apicultrice (in Picardy) with 3 hives in my third season! A huge flow of honey despite the drought conditions (hooray 9.5 mm rain last night, first rain for over a month!!) as we are between a huge forest and the plain with sunflowers (smothered with bees) and buckwheat. I...