Neils

I am still alive, honest.

Just taken off the honey from the Nature Reserve. Had a slight panic after the first taste that somehow I'd ended up with a lot of syrup in the supers. Then the sensible side of me kicked in a realised that this colony has had no syrup whatsoever this year but still the Honey is a lot runnier and less distinctly "honey" tasting than the stuff off the allotment. There's still a box or so to come off there tomorrow and hopefully that will be the end ...

I took the extractor for, pardon the pun, a spin this afternoon as I have a couple of boxes of capped honey ready for extraction. Having festooned the kitchen in newspaper and retrieved the rubber gloves from the apiary (surgical gloves FTW!) we finally had a go at sorting out some honey from one of the supers (the others are on my new apiary and I want to extract them separately).

I really want to stick some photos up but as the extractor is still dripping honey into the tank below ...

For once I get to blame the fairer half for forcing me to buy some shiny new stuff.

I just invested in a 4 frame extractor and settling tank. My suspicion is that for something I just shelled out £300 on this is going to be a relatively short term investment as I'm intending to expand up to at least 10 colonies sooner rather than later. But, in the spirit of not counting my chickens, I think it should last me for at least the next couple of seasons.

But I've 9 supers ...

More of an observation I guess than anything else. My colleagues bees arrived over the weekend. Bright yellow things, I thought mine were pretty calm, these are so laid back they're almost asleep!

Having hived them in 14x12s on standard national frames they've naturally gone and made a right mess of everything so we took a potter up to tidy up the bottom of the frames, mark a queen and give them a once over. With that done I decided I might as well check out the Nuc I hived last ...

Knew I'd forgotten something.

At the beginning of the year I spotted a request from a nature reserve just down the road from my parents who wanted bees on the land. Despite my parents having been there for nearly 20 years, none of us had any idea this reserve was just around the corner.

Back in february I went along to one of their work parties, met everyone and we found a site suitable for a few hives. Then in March we prepared the area, located away from the main ...