I've never treated my bees with oxalic acid, Bridget - so I can't give you any advice. Did you treat them today, and did the cluster stretch over both boxes?
I've never treated my bees with oxalic acid, Bridget - so I can't give you any advice. Did you treat them today, and did the cluster stretch over both boxes?
We treated all our Association Apiary with Oxalic Acid solution Saturday. Where they are on brood and half/double , and there were bees in teh bottom box, we treated each box.
(As a Langstroth Jumbo user, I think brood and half/double is a pig's ear -I hate lifting weights - back- but needs must.....:-)
Well the brood and half were not clustered. They were all over both boxes. Obviously it's Fraser who does the bees now so I didn't see them but he said the brood &1/2 were very full and busy although they haven't touched much of the fondant. They did go in with a lot of stores but the 1/2 seems light. My worry is that the brood box bees can't or won't get up to the fondant which is above the 1/2, and this is why they are all over the place. Still not much we can do now just have to wait it out. Other hives good though one dummied down hive is only about 3 to 4 frames. That's the only wooden hive I have.
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If I can be excused for briefly drifting off topic, this is just the point I was trying to make a couple of weeks back when someone with dadants was enquiring about building shallow boxes to fit his nucs... If you overwinter a colony (or nuc, in his case) on brood and a half without an excluder (half on top, where it belongs of course) you've got an easy, ready made split as soon as queen mating is viable because even at an early date the bees will be across both boxes if they're any good at all.
We were just talking about what we would do with the brood and a half when it got to spring . (We've not had b+1/2 before) and I said I thought we should split it, ensuring the queen is in the bottom half and the other 1/2 ,would make their own queen. I understand the problem is that it leads to a very slow build up but I suppose as long as all the bees didn't die out before she was mated and laying it should be OK and presumably if it got a bit light we could top up with some bees or a frame of brood from one of the others hives. Anyway up here in the highlands we would not be getting any local queens until late June. I had not thought about waiting till there were drones about, silly billy meme. Thanks for that Prakel, very useful.
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I should mention that I'd personlly add a ripe cell. I've done plenty of walk-away splits and come to the conclusion that the really successful ones, the one's which get the method a good name in some quarters, are more often than not the ones which soon afterwards supercede their new queen. I've seen this too many times to think that it's just an occassional fluke. Sure some emergency queens are OK but I reckon that a lot of them are little more than stop-gap 'fillers' till they get chance to raise a better one. Are bees that intelligent? Probably not but even so that's how it often appears to work out, for whatever reason. I think that it probably takes a very high degree of observation based timing (or sheer luck) to split two boxes and get a really good new queen as the result.
Nothing to do with bees, but I did get a little excited today when I read an email telling me I was due a tax rebate of almost £1,000.
It's a pity the email address and teh weblink didn't match HMRC's address, so sent if off as a reported phishing attempt.
Hi Bumble
My favourite was when I was offered a well paid job as a Secret Shopper
Better still it was in New Zealand
I didn't get a reply when I asked if travel expenses would be covered
Pity I was looking forward to that
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Bad wind
Possible "Where are we Toto ?" moment with hives carried off by the tornado
Two double nucs blown over but they were well strapped so stood them up again easily
Phew!
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