Jon

I ordered 9 cases of 18 Apideas from Swienty.
Not all for me but I do intend to hang on to at least 60.
The rest of them are going to local queen rearing groups.
Carriage from Denmark is 172 Euro so the order needs to be large to be cost effective but they are working out at under £18 each including the carriage and the cut the credit card company takes on the exchange rate.
In a decent season you should average over 2 queens per Apidea so it is an investment which should ...

Checked a colony on Friday which had a queen and brood 3 weeks ago.
All it had was a few capped cells on one frame and on opening a few they had chalk brood mummies inside.
The colony was really calm and had a single opened supersedure cell.
I thought maybe the queen had had a mishap the last time I opened it but if this were the case there would have been multiple emergency queen cells.
I could not find a virgin but the colony was very calm so I suspected there must ...

I have 4 queens overwintered in apideas.
Two of them had dwindled to the point where a couple of cold nights would have done for them.
I caged both the queens and made up a 2 frame nuc with each.
A frame of brood and a frame of stores and pollen in a poly nuc filled out with poly dummy frames.
Luckily I have a couple of colonies strong enough to take a frame of brood and bees from.
I left them closed up for 24 hours after making them up on Tuesday and let the bees ...