Jon

I have a colony to which I gave a second brood box a fortnight ago which now has 14 frames of brood. I set it up yesterday as a cell raiser with the queen in the bottom box,topped by a queen excluder a super,then the top box with most of the brood. I gave the top box a frame with ten grafts and on checking today two had been started. The first set of grafts offered often has poor acceptance but I am up and running now 5 weeks earlier than I started last year.
I regrafted the 8 larvae which ...

At the risk of incurring the wrath of the ghost of Rudolf Steiner and the entire anthroposcophy movement, I clipped seven queens yesterday evening.
I don't usually clip queens and last year I didn't have a single swarm but the swarming frenzy this year is making me nervous. There have been some in the Belfast area already - 4 that I know of. A guy from my bka lost a swarm 10 days ago and it ended up in his friend's chimney, - by coincidence very close to Ian Paisley's house. Can you imagine ...

20c in Belfast yesterday.
We took the dog for a dander over to the new apiary site at Minnowburn, a National Trust property.
A couple of my friends used to work for the National Trust and always refer to it as the National Front. I have been milliseconds away from letting slip the F word on a couple of occasions when speaking to the head warden.

We have a second site 200 yards away on private property where one of our BKA members has 4 colonies in a paddock.
The hives ...

Spent the afternoon with the folks as it was mothers day. Inevitably I spent more time with the old man looking at his bees.
His bees have overwintered well as he only lost a couple of nucs and still has a dozen colonies and two nucs.
He was worried about the two nucs and a couple of the colonies so I volunteered to check them for him.

The first nuc had only 3 frames of bees but there were a couple of frames of brood in a good pattern and I saw an unmarked queen. No ...

I had an e-mail from a friend kath last week to say that her colony was down to a few hundred bees and no queen. This was a nuc I sold her in July.
This afternoon I had another e-mail to say that she had had another look and there were only a couple of dozen bees but the queen was still there.
This was her first and only colony so I volunteered to rescue her queen to an Apidea.
I put a cupful of bees in an apidea from a nuc I have in the garden and brought it over. She opened ...