todays news

[Trog]

Two queens nicely mated here and one at the assoc apiary. Always nice when things go smoothly!

[Jon]

Hi Trog. After a 3 week wait I now have about a dozen laying. I think most of them flew and mated on Tuesday or Wednesday last week.
Too early to tell if they are well mated or not.

[Adam]

I've got a fair few queens laying now after a 3 day period of reasonable weather a week ago. It's all a month or more later than last year. There is one spot from where queens consistently fail to mate or disappear without mating. Same thing happened last year so that place will have no more mini-nucs from now on. The spot faces NW and gets plenty of late afternoon sun.

[Jon]

I have 8 laying in apideas in my front garden which are set out under a couple of fruit trees.
Be interesting to see what drones those ones have encountered. I have a couple of colonies in the back garden so they may well have produced a lot of them. The association apiary is just over a mile away and I have a few colonies there as well.
Seems to be a good enough spot for queens to fly and mate.
Adam, I suspect you are right that there are good spots and bad spots for apideas. Maybe into ley line territory here.

[Neils]

So I'm sat in the BRI having just taken a bunch of steroids and antihistamines to try and stop the reaction I'm having to a sting.

Ho hum. Time to start thinking seriously about how I manage this and keep bees.

[Trog]

Maybe we should have a sting thread - seems like more of us are reacting to stings when we didn't before. Might be useful to share information. Oh, and sympathetic thoughts in your direction, Nellie!

[Rosie]

Presumably BRI is Bristol Royal Infirmary. Sorry to hear this Nellie and hope you can find some way round the problem.

Rosie

[chris]

Really sorry to hear that Nellie.You need to take a bit of time, step back and look coldly at things. After my bad attack last year, it took me a long time to go back to the bees, and my enthusiasm is still not what it was.But I've been very careful, and haven't been stung since.Funny, I was kept in the unit under observation, and around 7 in the evening I was told I could leave in a couple of hours. I phoned my wife to tell (nicely ask) her to pick me up around ten. I forgot that the French work a 24hr. clock.So at 11 I'm sitting on a park bench with no phone, no money, no bank card, and she's fast asleep and going to pick me up at 10 the next morning............but I was still alive.

[Neils]

Well they sent me home with a course of antihistamines and some pretty vague advice. All things considered it was a fairly mild reaction, but I felt it was better to be safe. I'm more annoyed that I'm going to lose a swarm tomorrow.

"wear thicker gloves" was pretty much the limit of their advice.

[Jimbo]

For the first time in years I got 2 stings today on my face. I am still trying to work it out how the bees got inside my suit. Lucky for me I have been taking an antihistimine tablet daily for the last month as I have discovered I have mild hayfever. One sting was on the top lip and for a few hours it looked as though I had a trout pout. This would not bother me usually but I have an important meeting at work tomorrow and did not want to turn up looking like the elephant man. The worst bit was I had to go back into the hive again to find the queen as there were queens cells present and I had to deal with it.