We have three supers, 30 frames, of honey, to harvest. Should weigh in at about 60 pounds. Thank you for the offers to host the honey extraction, I decided that for reasons of convenience the sticky kitchen award goes to Mark and Beki. So next Saturday at 5 in the afternoon we meet at Prospect […]

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Nothing has changed since my last report. We have 3 supers of honeys to take from our hives. I have added clearer boards to two of them to remove the bees. On wednesday we will check how that has progressed and inspect the brood boxes since these haven’t been done while the honey flow was […]

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Back from hols! We will be inspecting our colonies tomorrow at 5:15. All welcome.   The last inspection was 12 days ago, the merging of our queenless colony 3  with colony 1, had gone well, and hive 2 was full of brood meaning our new queen is doing her stuff. We have three heavy supers […]

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Siobhan and I did some cool beekeeping at 7:45 this morning.We confirmed that our hive 3 was definitely queenless and merged these bees with hive 1 which was queenright. If all goes well this will give us a strong colony to overwinter for next year. Despite being without a queen for a month the bees […]

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It’s a pivotal moment in the beekeeping year. Our colonies have used the spring and early summer to build up their size, with the aim of maximising the number of foragers ready to bring in a summer flower nectar for our honey harvest. Fingers crossed that swarming is now finished for this year and that […]

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Siobhan and I did an impromptu bee inspection today. It’s been 10 days since we last looked at our colonies and bearing in mind we had a suspected queenless colony to merge, we decided that we ought to get it done before the colony deteriorated. The upshot was that these insects have outwitted me yet again. […]

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