Confessions Thread

[fatshark]

Confession time … checked through half a dozen nucs arranged in as a 'circle split' … QC's went in sufficiently long time ago that they should be out and mated by now. The first one was desperately short of bees and clearly being robbed out. I gave the box a cursory look over, convinced myself it was being robbed out, so moved it aside and shook all the bees out. Returned to the stand to recover the roof which I'd laid aside …

… there on the hive stand was a Q, just about to take off. Which she did. A couple of ineffective swipes later and I decided some quiet swearing was probably necessary.

What d'you bet she returns finally to the nuc on other side of the hive stand and slaughters the laying Q … ?

[The Drone Ranger]

Put this Apidea away in a cardboard box with a bunch of Keilers
On the floor of my bee shed so maybe not too smart of me

2.jpg

3.jpg

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And all because the lady mouse loves Apidea


Yes that pile of gravel inside is the front of the feeder compartment munched up

[busybeephilip]

Ouch !!

Thats what has happened to a batch of my apideas when I got a bad mouse /rat infestation in my old falling apart bee shed.It prompted me to abandon apideas and go for the wooden single frame type with glass sides. The logic being that mousey wont find it so easy to destroy them. I'm slowly building up the numbers and so far they seem to work ok using a 4 pint feeder cup full to fill them.

Jon has seen one of my earlier efforts but then he's a dedicated apidea man, very similar to this https://youtu.be/6oKQNnB-JlU but I use a side feeder and removable top bar with frame attached

There are advantages and disadvantages, they are for primarily for mating queens not to be maintained as a small colony for a long time like an apidea, you can take mated queens out and replace with a cell or virgin while allowing some brood rearing to take place provided there is enough bees remaining to ensure survival, the feeder can be replaced. A small disc entrance with exclude option can be used after queen mated to avoid any absconding

[prakel]

I'd love to hear more about the single frame boxes in use Phillip if you can fit it in somewhere.

There are of course wooden apidea type boxes offered by a few companies -but I expect they'd cause discontent in the extreme-insulator camp where they keep bees with maths instead of common sense.

[The Drone Ranger]

HI Phillip
That one in the pics had a wooden float as you can see and the feeder had been used with syrup so it must have been impregnated with sweetness
You can see how the little bandit made the entrance bigger to get in

When I tried overwintering double apideas it was a hard Winter and they didn't make it Trouble was like you the rats found them and absolutely demolished them to get the comb
That was an expensive lesson
Keilers are a bit bigger and I brought a couple through on double boxes on a high shelf this Winter

I'm like Prakel and really interested in your mating nucs
The video is good unfortunately I would need some German lessons to get the most from it
On first reading I thought 4 pints blimey thats a lot of bees
Then I twigged you said just the cup from a 4 pint feeder lol!
I just cut a 1 pint plastic milk carton in half at an angle and mark 150ml
That gives you a thin walled flexible scoop with a little handle

[busybeephilip]

I'd love to hear more about the single frame boxes in use Phillip if you can fit it in somewhere.

There are of course wooden apidea type boxes offered by a few companies -but I expect they'd cause discontent in the extreme-insulator camp where they keep bees with maths instead of common sense.

I'll try an take some pictures this evening when I'm home. i've seen the wooden apideas and if you buy a load from that site it works out much the same as poly apideas as the postage does not increase till you get into larger numbers of boxes. I'd thought of making some but they are even more fiddley that what I'm using at present and I value my fingers when it comes to playing with table saws

[busybeephilip]

here is some picsrejected virgin.jpgassembly.jpgnuc parts.jpgnuc side view.jpgnuc.jpg

hope this works ok cos i had to reduce them from 2MB each

The frame holder consists of a box with 3 upright sides and a floor piece which I cut out in bulk, I use a jig to align them and screw the plexiglass sides on. The lid is attached to the frame so the lid and frame can be extracted/withdrawn as one piece with bees and inserted into a new box containing candy if needed. Each house hold 2 nucs. In this example a marked V queen was introduced after wetting through the top plug hole 12 hours ago (this morning at 7am now 9-20 pm). In this case you can see the queen lying dead in the bottom of the box. If this was an apidea you would have no idea if the queen had been accepted or not, and you might be waiting a week before realizing the queen was dead. Usually there is some badgering of the queen but they then leave her alone after a few minutes,

[busybeephilip]

cant post image of honuchouse.jpguse for some reason?

got it now

The other thing i forgot to mention, the feeder chamber is the same dimension as a ribena juice packet, to if you want to feed syrup this option is available making sure you provide a float in the syrup

[The Drone Ranger]

Thanks Phillip
I can spend the Winter months trying to make some

[HJBee]

Thought this was apt for confessions thread, since we all commit this inferred sin