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I love being in this apiary in the early evening so I thought I'd share a photo with y'all. Trouble is that I then forgot to take home the mini nucs that I'd just stocked with bees and a queen cell. They're sitting there, right in the middle of the picture.

Made surfaces on top of my back fence for mini-mating nucs (Apideas). Glad to say it was all outdoors in the sunshine, and not in the garage. Getting the boards at B&Q yesterday was a delight. The chap at the cutting booth (always very helpful, even when he has to say no) collected an 8x4...

If the queen is becoming a drone layer (running out of sperm), the eggs are indistinguishable from worker eggs. Later, the larvae are bigger and the cells are extended (as in your earlier photos), but the adult drones are smaller - or so I've found.

Planning and measuring for larger surfaces for my Apideas. I don't want them in my apiaries - too many other bees who will probably get nosey. Last year they were on pairs of decking boards making a platform on top of my garden fence, bordering a commercial orchard. This year I'm going to make...

I'm not in love with any particular method of queen cell raising - yet. Last week I started one that worked well for me last year for several cycles - a queenless nuc which is continually restocked with open brood. Today I used a Cloake board (queenless for a day, then queenright). That also...

Grafting today was easy-peasy - after an absolutely miserable experience last week when the technique seemed to have deserted me forever. In the end I got there and 6/10 were accepted. Today, before leaving the house, I tested and discarded some of the tools, and took time to get the feeling of...

Discovered that a quarantined collected swarm had absconded - into the neighbouring nuc with another, much smaller, swarm. How convenient!

This is essential advice.

No need to go to the optician for this. Buy a range of cheap reading glasses (they are available in 1.0-3.5 dioptres). Sometimes they only cost a pound or two.

Some things are amazingly cheap. Another for beekeepers is the STC-1000 temperature controller.

Found it. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0247323 This study in 2021 includes 18 videos showing a range of bee behaviours. 'After oviposition (S1 Video), the egg remains motionless until the larvae hatch. As workers successively move as deeply as possible into...

From a couple of days ago: Lots of yellow rattle in the 'orchard' apiaries, and beans flowering at the nature reserve. That was unexpected because the plants are much smaller this year.

The WhatsApp message just out from Ian Campbell with a Defra update today includes this: 'Genetic analysis has now been completed on the three other queens found at Four Oaks, Kent, and the single individuals at Romford, London, and Ash, Kent. The analysis has indicated that the hornets found...

When I've removed a swarm from a tree, I spray some where the cluster was and it does discourage them from returning. Not needed of course if you can lower the whole lot gently into a box with a single snip of if a branch.

Thanks for the tip but being realistic, it ain't going to happen. The only time I've tried to isolate a site from ants was a holiday house in my one trip to the sun (Majorca). It did work, spraying a line round the outside of the whole house.

I did lose one swarm early in April - before I'd started my weekly inspections. Sure there were gaps in the cold and wet when I could have inspected, and the bees took one such chance to leave. But they're waiting for the opportunity with few other cares. We're not necessarily able to act with...

Emyr, you asked that in reply to the statement that a poster didn't like seeing ants around their hives. It was just the 'Why' I needed. Since then I've given up tapping crown boards on the ground to shake off the ants and their eggs. And feeling quite pleased with myself to boot. So it came as...

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.