BBKA Forum

Cleared three full supers into 2 empty supers on 20th of this month. Went back this morning to strap them up ready to move to heather and blimey the little blighters have filled an half capped both supers. in less than 7 days. I know they are a strong colony but this is ridiculous.
Looks like a brush off and replace with another 2 empty this afternoon as tomorrow they are heading to the moors....if they keep this rate of income up out there could be a decent heather harvest.

What a fantastic reward for all the hard work:)

NigelP wrote: ↑

27 Jul 2021, 11:20

Cleared three full supers into 2 empty supers on 20th of this month. Went back this morning to strap them up ready to move to heather and blimey the little blighters have filled an half capped both supers. in less than 7 days. I know they are a strong colony but this is ridiculous.
Looks like a brush off and replace with another 2 empty this afternoon as tomorrow they are heading to the moors....if they keep this rate of income up out there could be a decent heather harvest.

What are they foraging on Nigel?

Bramble, I think.
But could well be wrong.....it's been a strange year.
Samples from sent to Honey monitoring scheme so will find out next spring.
Last year turnip (cover crop) predominated.

The wasp traps have been deployed in the garden apiary near to where I have made five nucs with bought in Queens..I need to check them on friday to make sure none of the Queens have been turfed out..

At my home apiary, my CBPV colony replaced it's queen a short while ago with a small, unexciting looking one and although the colony is still small in the numebr of bees, the dead-bee pile has not increased for a little while. Despite other colonies having a fair amount of honey, this one now had 7 frames of decent-looking brood at last and just two of honey as the older bees have been keeling over before they could forage much. However they have now produced another supercedure queencell so I will unite to another colony that has a selected queen in it. I hope the virus has now gone.

At the field, a colony had a young queen that was superceded. A nuc with 3 very nice frames of brood to my eyes. I whipped the old queen out after seeing the daughter on the frame with her, which had had just emerged and put her in another colony where the queen had failed to mate/disappeared, to see what would happen - and within a week there were queencells in that one too. She has to go! If I don't do it, the bees will do it for me.

Extracted some very unusual dark honey today, never had this from my local apiary, sorry I still can't figure out how to reduce the picture size on this Victorian web site.

Dead easy open image in windows 10 picture viewer....click on the three little dots at top of screen and choose resize option. Select smallest option, save image and then upload that to ayour web host and use link as usual.



Bit unclear what we are looking at here though Mick..

Thanks for that Nigel. picture works fine on any other sites I visit just on here it blows up big for some reason.
The picture is dark honey in a white food bucket.

That IS dark.