If you saw what happened when I got stung on the heid there's no way I'm risking a kilt! :$Originally Posted by Paul
So nobody has yet tried Beekeeping in a Kilt? No need for a Nuc box if your wearing your own personal Skep
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been stung on the todger - wasnt that bad.. Tip of the nose is worse if you can imagine that!
Dare I ask how a bee happened to be in that vicinity?!! Probably illegal however it happened!
Probably why he did a runner to Germany!
One balmy evening in Germany, we transported some bees to a new site, by the time they got there it was dark...
It had been a long drive, I was gasping for a pee...
But as ever bees first, we unloaded & I pulled out the fabric we had stuffed in the entrances to keep the bees in, so they would get a breath of fresh air. Then I went to relieve myself in a bush. A night-fighter got me! Wasnt easy to get the prick out of my **** in the dark, but I was well motivated.
The wife was very impressed, for a while.
Still not as bad as a sting just inside the rim of the nostril!
Too many Lidl shills on this forum!
Just got confirmation that I can begin putting hives beside a local well known castle and next to their walled garden. Heaving with lime trees and right below a rather large managed heather moor. I am well pleased to say the least!!
Trials and tribs......my queenless hive is no more queenless ! The queencells that resulted from a cut out of eggs from my best AMM colony have yielded a queen. Three torn down and empty and 1 that had hatched. I even managed to spot the virgin running about. Fantastic. Hopefully this weather will stay for her to get mated. She was not huge but I guess that will change ?
As for my 2 big hives.....lets just say they are about to swarm (queen cells maybe 3 days from capping) and I don't have time to do much this week
Not sure if this is the best place for general beekeeping questions, but dear, learned members of SBAI, if you will indulge a question from someone well south of the border, here goes.
My best and strongest colony is mystifying me by nether swarming nor continuing to build up and I am wondering if the queen is running out of steam. It overwintered in double Paynes poly national broods (and survived being blown over twice in the storms!) I added a super early April as they were doing so well. I had no excluder handy and they pretty quickly filled the super with wall to wall drone brood. Not crazy popcorn, but whole frames of lovely even, pale coloured drone brood. I eventually added a second super above an excluder which is now a bit less than half full. My bees at this apiary are in the middle of forest and heath, so don't bring in much OSR.
Meanwhile in the lower boxes the bees have started backfilling the brood nest with stores and the brood areas have become rather scattered with quite a lot of drone round the edges and sometimes right across. There are several frames of perfect, capped worker brood, and a few areas with eggs and young brood.
The workforce is contented, gentle and motivated. There are, however, so many drones flying in and out as to make the hive clearly audible from 30ft away. It did occur to me that maybe I had absent mindedly put drone foundation in that super without an excluder, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Some of the combs on the super have both worker and drone brood, but in consistent, even patches.
The thing is, I have checked them regularly and there is no sign of queen cells, barely even a cup. Has this colony just decided to make drones instead of having swarms (hence them drawing out drone comb off worker foundation)? Or is the queen conking out?
If it comes to it, is there a lazy way of requeening without finding her? Tis a pain searching 30 frames and 3 boxes and my success rate is typically low.
I find that a protected queen cell works almost every time. In fact the only time it has ever failed me was at the end of a season.
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