Blog Comments

no no, well done on your pass you put loads of work in and it is a difficult subject .............

A man after my own heart Nellie.
I remember at university in the early years the only thing that mattered was pass or fail. No marks were carried forward.
I used to study until I thought I knew enough to get the pass mark and no more.
At the end of my first year I passed 3 out of 4 subjects by just a percent or two.

I do inspect without gloves now and again, but when I'm going through multiple colonies I much prefer gloves, it's amazing how quickly you get gummed up and the gloves make me that little bit less twitchy about the whole affair.

DId look into whether I could get to Gormanston, but just can't do it at the moment, got a load of other workshops, meetings and shenanigans planned and the Mrs wasn't too keen on a "holiday" planned around beekeeping.

both were stung while I remained unscathed on our afternoon out, small victories and all

Sods law. I always get stung when I have an audience, usually when I open a colony which I have just claimed is the most docile in the apiary.
They are always better behaved when I am on my own but who is going to believe that? It sounds like BS.
I usually use nitrile gloves but Apideas and nucs I am happy to handle bare handed.
I keep telling people that they can sting through nitrile but chose not to - but it tends to be met with disbelief.
I am working towards working all of my own bare handed but I don't trust other people's colonies and would always wear the nitrile. I checked a few of my father's colonies a few weeks back without gloves but that was only because I didn't have any with me. No stings though. Surprising well behaved.
I hope to meet Meg at Gormanston this year.

I agree with Roger on a lot of what he says around inspecting. I'm far from perfect but I inspect a few hundred colonies last year and got stung 3-4 times that I can recall but between the two of us we only have 5 colonies. Mossies love me, bees don't tend to sting me. I'm not a wander through a buzzing crowd of angry bees and get left alone kind of guy, but generally I don't get stung unless I do something stupid, like I did today.

Do you inspect without gloves? I normally wear nitrile/latex gloves and they just don't sting through them, they can, but if the cuffs ride up they'll go for the wrists.

Funnily enough, and at the risk of speaking for her, Meg is a gentle handler of bees as is our local guru. Both taught me a huge amount around handling bees last year, I didn't mention it at the time but both were stung while I remained unscathed on our afternoon out, small victories and all

I would average 3-4 per week!
If you are checking a dozen colonies per week I don't reckon that is bad.
I don't mind the odd sting. What I don't like is the idea of crushing and killing bees during an inspection. I don't seem to react much to stings. It hurts for 5 minutes and then it's gone.
When an inspection goes right, I know I have not killed a single bee.
Some people I have watched crush dozens if not hundreds on every inspection and they also take multiple stings into their astronaut gear, killing the bees in the process.
And they are capable of telling you that they haven't been stung for 6 months!!
Don't start Roger Patterson on this. He claims that a lot of beekeepers wear so much gear that they are unaware of how aggressive their bees are and how badly they handle them. I suspect he is absolutely right.

The worst I had last year was checking apideas. I had 10 to check and I removed the lid and plastic inner cover from the first one and immediately got stung 5 times on the wrist.

I figure 3-4 a year is about right and most of mine are still bees flying into my hair. This one I asked for, I got cocky, full 14x12 hive open 1st gen cross of an Italian queen but no, I'm a bee whisperer right? Wrong. Most of mine last year were because I had short sleeved gloves so they ignore the hands and went right for the gap between the suit and the gloves.

Honestly, I should know <expletive> better by now.

Apart from the odd one a couple of years ago that went into my hair I don't think I've been stung outside of inspecting. I still remember my first AS where they started to get very angry because I just took so long. I shudder to think of walking up to that like I did to today.

It's funny in some respects, I did nothing wrong apart from a basic lack of respect, the bees were bees. I see various people posting pictures of themselves holding frames and always think they're playing with fire, yet today I did nothing different, I was stupid and I got stung as a result.

I got a nice one inside my right ear last week as I was leaning over a hive admiring the pollen loads arriving.
Most of the stings I get are bees flying into me accidently as I walk about the apiary and the odd one on the fingers when checking colonies.

Sounds brilliant, it can go with my WBC solitary bee house in the garden

LOL. I am not that cruel!
I'll keep an eye out for bee tat now that I know you are an avid collector.
What about a giant bumble for your car antenna. A guy in my bka has one of those.

I'll get her number and you can tell a 9 year old her present is guff

Picked up another one this morning! Another nice big prime swarm. Running out of kit now

Settled maybe 10 foot away from where the first one did. Wonder if Roger is on to something?

You reckon your bees are twee enough to fall for that guff? Mine would eject the pieces like so many chalk brood mummies.

Happy days. Will not be long before we join you.

Well, the queens already gone and I agree with you about following, we'll see how her daughter fares.

We're down on queens at the moment, out of 5 colonies only two are queenright and they're not inclined right now to start swarming, typically. That said we've collected a swarm this evening so we'll see how they get on, at least that brings us up to 50% queenright!.

If you dont want to graft, just cut out a ripe queen cell from one of your colonies and put it in the apidea with a cupful of bees.
I am planning out a queen rearing course based on apideas and some of those who will be participating have not got bees yet.
There is no rocket science to an apidea. It's just a percentages game as some queens will get lost and some will fail to mate.
If you put 3 queen cells in 3 apideas the chances are you will get one or two mated queens. Three would be very lucky, none would be very unlucky.
I did this for people who brought me apideas last year and most of them got a mated queen or two out of it.

Re. following. If I had bees follow me 5 metres let alone 200 the queen would be on the way out. Following is one of the most unacceptable traits in beekeeping as non beekeepers get stung.

If you want to collect samples of 30-50 bees I will do the morphometry for you. Your colony may be some sort of hybrid. Wing morphometry can be a blunt instrument, cue R. Bache, but it can throw up useful information.

Indeed, walk before you can run though and all that. I removed 15 queen cells from the swarmed colony though I'm not sure that I'd necessarily want queens from them. The colony was marked as being twitchy last year and we were followed a good 200 meters once we closed up! Definitely not the sort of bees I want on the allotment. That said they are queenless and they settled pretty quickly, but I'll reassess them later. If I had the Nucs I've ordered I might have made a couple up, I guess I can console myself that assuming the new queen emerges and mates ok that hive is going to produce most of my honey this year and I'll be taking a new super down pronto to keep them busy.

I hate destroying queen cells so maybe I should get my hands on a couple of apideas in the meantime anytime and take the plunge sooner rather than later. I'll do some reading obviously but at a basic level is it as simple as graft the cell, chuck in a handful of (young?) bees and leave them to it?

Hi Neil

today they were absolutely packed to bulging with bees

A lot of people don't even realise they have lost a swarm because the box is still crammed.

There is practically nothing in beekeeping you can't fix with a spare queen cell or better still a few mated queens in Apideas.
You could buy a couple of Apideas at £20 a pop and use those spare queen cells to keep a couple of mated queens in reserve.
You can keep the apideas on a north facing windowsill at home so easily looked after.
It really changes your perception as you just requeen immediately and it is business as usual. There are cheaper Apideas at a tenner each which probably work just as well. I see it as cheap insurance.

@calum. Consistent bad weather anytime a Queen Mates over the past 3 years is starting to stretch credibility a bit. I dare say that one or two might just be poorly mated. I won't know for sure for another year. I have 3 Colonies from a single split last year, 2 queens failed, the other one is going great guns. It might just be bad luck, we'll see what happens this year.

@Jon, Wont be topping myself just yet, not done anything wrong to want to just yet. Just gone from 3 coming through winter to not having a laying queen in any of the hives. The one that swarmed that was my own fault. Figured if I ran in the queen and gave them a frame in all stages that I pretty much hedged my bets. Have to keep telling myself that it's early. I didn't have Drone brood, let alone drones until this point last year, this year the "best" colony swarmed before I got there to do a first inspection! Live and learn.

So much for this years beekeeping resolution: "I will not lose a swarm", would have been interesting to see what they were like a week ago, today they were absolutely packed to bulging with bees.

Drone layers - possibly poor weather during their mating flights..
?