Jon

I treated the 6 colonies I have at the bottom of the garden this morning.
The total used was 125 ml which lets you know that some of them were a bit smaller than expected as it is 5 ml per seam of bees.
5 of the 6 should be ok as they had tightly packed clusters over 4-6 frames. One nuc was down to about 1-2 frames and probably won't make it.
Tomorrow is to be mild and the clusters will probably look twice as big when they loosen up a bit.
Mine always seem to overwinter ...

We had gale force winds last night so I had to check the colonies for damage today.

I was out for a couple of hours - an 11 mile round trip on the bike taking in the association apiary on the NT site, the donkey apiary nearby and my allotment which is 5 miles further on via the Lagan towpath.
No lids off was the good news. I only have one nuc at the association apiary and it seems to be doing well. I hefted it and it was fairly heavy.

There were very few bees ...

Spent the afternoon scraping propolis from apideas and putting frames in a box for fumigating with acetic acid.
The bees in the garden were working hard bringing in pollen in a light mizzle with the temperature about 12c

I still have 9 occupied apideas, 7 with laying queens and two with virgins which I presume will not mate now although I had a queen in a nuc start laying around 1st October.
Some of the apideas are a bit weak and will hardly make it through winter but ...

I have a big colony at the bottom of the garden which was on double brood and 4 supers at one point over the summer. The top brood box was almost completely full of capped honey with just a couple of small patches of brood at the bottom of 3 of the centre frames. I extracted the supers a couple of weeks ago and decided to remove the top brood box with the honey before starting Apiguard treatment. On the spur of the moment I decided to make up a nuc with the 3 frames which had a little brood. I added ...

Our association got a new extractor on Friday and I volunteered to try it out over the weekend.
It is a manual 4 frame tangental extractor, cheap and cheerful at about £220.

I normally use my father's motorised job but this one worked fine albeit much more slowly.
The advantage of a motorised one is that you can use the spinning time to uncap another 4 frames and you get the work done twice as quickly.

I extracted 5 supers and got 112 lbs of honey although ...