Recent content by Pope Pius IX

Makes sense, thank you!

Thanks all. I will harvest from one super from each hive, maybe 1.5 supers if they are indeed heavy, and then then apivar will be added. The remaining supers will be marked so that the honey isn't consumed by humans, then at some point before spring taken, cleaned and put back on. If that's...

Thank you. One question though - at what point should supers be added to a treated hive?

Four colonies. I will look into sublimation but yes, there's the inevitable forest of paperwork to go through if the students are going to do it. PPE won't be a problem, but the paperwork will be problematic...

Thank you for all this! The four hives each have two supers and one brood. So I think I'll extract the honey and put in fondant/syrup. We'll not be at the hives until Wednesday, but what would I be looking for in terms of weight? Good tip on the changing treatment, thank you. We're near Sutton.

Hello everyone, The school I work for now has four hives and I need to consider varroa treatment (as routine, rather than because of a noted presence of varroa.) The hives currently have honey for harvesting and I won't be able to harvest it for two weeks. After this, I intend to put apivar...

Hello everyone and thanks for all the advice. At least consensus is that the wax is savable, so that's the bit I'll be focusing on at first. I'm also not going to have any human beings eat the honey. My mind isn't yet made up on the feeding of it to bees, and thank you to all those who've...

Thanks both, that's really useful. On balance, doesn't seem like my eating (or selling) the honey would be prudent. I may end up putting the frames back for the bees, in a hive, having frozen them first. One other possibility occurred to me...if I were to melt the wax & honey using a steamer...

Hello everyone, beginner's questions here. I got a fair few frames of honey of varying quality (probably about 20 supers and 6 brood) from the hives I had back in September. However, the hives were at my place of work and I didn't have an extractor, so the honey just sat in the frames. I put...

Thanks for the answers so far. Hopefully it is starvation and no sort of horrible disease. There was no honey in the super but I assumed they had enough left in the brood, and as they were gathering I assumed it would generally top itself up. Clearly a reminder that I need to feed even when...

Hello everyone. Happy for this post to be moved elsewhere if it's not "Honeybee Health"... I have three colonies; I last inspected two weeks ago and two I'd bought this year were super-healthy and one that I'd got last year and had come through the winter seemed to be doing OK - no varroa...

Thanks everyone for all of this. The "what were you thinking" I can answer - I wanted to sit a Warre and a National next to each other and in future years compare honey flow, disease levels and so on. Might be something in that. Additionally, we only got funding for the club in April by which...

Hello everyone. First post from me here for a while. Probably a beginner's question but happy for it to be moved elsewhere. I've recently started a beekeeping club at my work, which is a school. We're fortunate to have quite a big budget to play with so to keep it interesting, we're getting...

Ok, I have done the last fiddling for a while! I put the frames back in the brood box, including four that I'd been storing in the fridge for lack of anywhere else to put them, then took away the top super and the feeder and added the brood. Bees now have a brood box, and a super with stores...

All the super combs looked fine with plenty of cells capped and containing honey. No sign at all of anything else, though. I think I may go and put the brood box back...