Strong SW and some big Congestus today. On arrival home I noticed a lot of bees around a hole in the soffit above the front door. I should have acted straight away, as they were just explorer bees, and the main swarm had yet to arrive. (I could have set up an alternative bait hive […]
I tried this method as an alternative to Warre´s method of artificial swarming for the case when: 1) The top box may not have viable eggs 2) Through the windows I can see obvious signs of queen cell construction in the 2nd box. The Warre method of driving the bees down and leaving the top […]
A decision to go Foundationless During the winter of 2007/8 I was preparing to make a large batch of top bar hives to move many of my Langstroth colonies to them in the spring of 2008. With modest experimentation during the 2007 season I found I much preferred the bees to construct natural comb. As […]
What I like most about the old mountain villages of Gredos is the way the were made from local materials which were used in simple structures with elegant solutions to common construction problems. Some of these methods unchanged since the time of the Vettons before the Roman invasion. The buildings fit in with the local […]
My bees at around 1600m near Tortoles have had a tough summer. Although there is abundant bloom in spring, the southern part of the valley is very dry and there seems little forage for July and August. One of my best looking hives in spring, which I expected to reach 3 Warre boxes had almost […]
Stormy weather today for the German Paragliding open, so plenty of time to do some bee jobs which need to be done. A few day ago I removed from a tree one of my few successful bait hives. It was a cylindrical double walled plastic piece of tubing, normally used for drainage, which I cut […]
With the honey top box removed, a plastic mesh covers the top bars, then over this goes the inverted clearer board. On the wire a kitchen towel soaked in formic acid, and on top of that to prevent evaporation
Today I made my first harvest from a Warre hive. The hive was the very first I set up, using a conversion board to allow the colony set up in a framed Langstroth hive to grow down into the smaller Warre box. After filling two boxes, the colony seems to have slowed down its development, […]
One of the splits form some months back is in a rather disorganised Langstroth hive, with a good number of bees but little brood as yet. Because it is unlikely I will get a harvest from them this year, I want them to go into winter in a home better organised by them, rather than […]
Two of my hives have been suffering heavily from Chalkbrood, so yesterday I used the Warré Pioneering