BBKA Forum

Always check your wellies, sounds really painful!!
Ha ha, Mick I'm waiting for your witty reply??!!

Ha Funny enough I have been to our allotments today and put AH warning posters up.
Nigel, they will be fine here as its warm in winter, its spring thats freezing but they will have a snug warm nest by then

Went to the out apiary at the weekend. It was relatively mild and all hives had bees coming and going. One mini-plus hive was very light so they had some syrup to keep them going.
The danger time for starvation is from now onwards, so I'll check at the weekend as it is due to be dry then.

It's quite uplifting to see the bees coming and going this early on and a reminder that spring is on its way!
Mine have plenty of fondant which they seem to have chosen over stores??!!

Nice cold day to clean the wax off my heather super frames. For those that don't extract heather honey you need to cut the super out of the frame, leaving empty frames covered in wax etc, so to reuse you need to remove all this residual wax.
Bought a wonderful bit of kit a couple of years ago, an old Polish Potato Boiler. Takes a couple of hours to get to a boil (large volume of water). But cleaned 26 supers worth of frames of all residual wax in around 2 hours. My old method of scrape and scrape took around 10 days at 2 hours per day. Also cleans queen excluders in seconds....

Busy day today installing mud mats behind hives in 2 Apiary sites. The ground is super saturated and will rapidly turn to mud if frequently walked on (see picture 2). But these plastic mud mats should keep everything dry and above mud level, and when the grass grows through them will become invisible.

Great idea & I do like the look of the green hives, they blend into the environment

Bit of cleaning, bit of flame gun use, started creating 2nd tool kit to take to a new out apiary when I get to set it up.

Masses of weeding in the garden ready for a hive in my borders.

Thanks for the post Juno,
Welcome to the Forum.

I checked some of my colonies at the weekend.
All those checked are alive, however one was a bit 'lively' and another was not a large colony; it had raised worker brood - easily seen by looking side-on at the domed cappings and an old queen = drone layer. She was not looking too sprightly either. There were no supercedure cells so I am confident that there is just one old queen in there; I should have changed her last year in any case but didn't get around to it and thankfully have a couple of spares in mini-plus hives. So far so good I suppose. I'll check the remaining stocks later when I have time and whip out the old queen for new then.