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  • General Q&A, Bee chat and only Bee chat please
General Q&A, Bee chat and only Bee chat please
 #7006  by NigelP
 11 May 2020, 19:19
curly green finger's wrote:
11 May 2020, 18:58

How's your spring going nigel?
Usual, some honey, some swarming, a couple of very aggressive colonies to sort out, plus lots of other strange things going on. Fairly normal for this time of year.
How's your season going?
 #7007  by curly green finger's
 11 May 2020, 19:39
Not to bad I'm on my third demaree.
Im using the third for breeding.. Using a Miller frame in the top box.
No honey as yet.
I've one colony with three supers though these are pure blacks.
I've had one Italian colony that needed splitting as they were on 11frames of solid brood nasty buggers these are the 6 frame nuc had a capped qc from one of my black colonys hopefully alls good with them.
I've found some decent Heather at last :D
The site is part of the wild life Trust no pesticides on any of the local smallholdings or the common.
I could go on nigel. :roll:
 #7009  by Patrick
 11 May 2020, 21:05
Hi Curly

Welcome to the forum and yes, very interested in how you get on with your black bees. Sounds like they are doing well. What’s the temperament like?
 #7013  by curly green finger's
 11 May 2020, 21:23
Patrick wrote:
11 May 2020, 21:05
Hi Curly

Welcome to the forum and yes, very interested in how you get on with your black bees. Sounds like they are doing well. What’s the temperament like?
In comparison to my mongrels they are like pussy cats. They're very stable on the frame.
I've also buckfast/ Italians and there very aggressive hence me not trying to just requeen them. but I've nucs which will be united back to the parent colonys hopefully.
 #7032  by Japey Edge
 12 May 2020, 12:22
Made my two push in queen intro cages last night. Two new buckfast queens arrived today (with a fair few attendants).

Not the warmest day but I've thought my plan through so will make it as swift as possible.

Queenless nuc will get a queen. Not sure they're definitely queenless so need to make sure beforehand. Might have to filter the bees through a queen excluder into a new nuc to make sure this introduction is good.

Big colony with new virgin of unknown status will be donating frames of brood to a new nuc for the second queen. Will shake bees in from supers.

:?
 #7035  by stechad
 12 May 2020, 12:38
Japey Edge wrote:
12 May 2020, 12:22

Big colony with new virgin of unknown status will be donating frames of brood to a new nuc for the second queen. Will shake bees in from supers.

:?
Make sure not to shake the virgin queen if there is one, can be hard to spot VQ being smaller
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