Recent content by BeeKeyPlayer

Ongrading. Maybe it won't turn out to be any better than ours. 🤞

Not just the modern retail world :) I keep my honey extraction and jarring records in kg but have a column with the imperial equivalents so that I'll be able to contribute to any beekeeper conversation in imperial about amounts of honey. It doesn't work though, because with two sets of...

What is happening to the egg is that workers are entering the cells and head butting the eggs down to a horizontal position. There is a scientific video of this but it's a few years since I've seen it and I don't have time at the moment to dig it out. Sorry.

I think that's pretty good rate if you use bare hands or nitriles. But I've decided that stings to my hands are no longer acceptable (I have my reasons), and I would like others who feel the same to know that it is possible to be a beekeeper and not get stung. It doesn't have to be part of the...

I wash the suit after every session and my hive tool and gloves between every hive. Sometimes there are numerous stings on the suit but I didn't take notice last night, so the answer is Don't know, but probably.

A year or two ago, I decided that I was going for zero tolerance of bee stings. Mostly I'm managing, even when some bees got into my suit on two days last week - till I found the secret gap in a seam (thanks for the tip, Emyr). So when I was dealing with four big colonies this evening, and was...

I've seen a talk on this by the same person at the National Honey Show. I'll listen to this version as a refresher course.

Will this still work for swarm control? I'm following Dan Basterfield on this. He says that swarming is prevented by depriving the queen of a large chunk of the foragers.

I know! In warmer weather I'd be wearing less under my suit... Not nice.

Bingo! I found a gap in the seam in the crotch - so the bees have the option to go down or up :ROFLMAO:

Thanks. Which box do you put the queen in, upper or lower?

In the past, if I had a bee inside my Sherriff suit, it was because I was chatting while zipping up and didn't do the job properly. This season, a couple of times, I've had a couple of bees inside my suit - and I can't figure out how they got in. After the first time, I taped over where the zips...

This, according to PlantNet, is Garlic mustard (a brassica) and it is flowering in huge quantities on untended land here just now, especially margins. I see it's also called Jack-by-the-hedge. I looked up mustard as a crop. It's yellow (no surprise) and, according to my source, flowers in late...

I did a vertical split on this colony a few days ago. They were already double brood and there was a lot of brood in both boxes. Very little stores. I made sure the queen was in the bottom box, rotated it 180°, gave them some fondant in an eke below the split board with the entrance facing the...

Checked hives in this apiary yesterday. The bees were quick to come out if the sun came out, but otherwise kept away from the chilly air. One hive had a drone laying queen. I was able to replace her a couple of weeks ago with a queen from a friend but the new queen, though accepted, is not...