View Full Version : apidea management and grafting photos
This is a series of pictures about apideas. I took most of them earlier this evening and yesterday.
Click the images for bigger pictures.
This is what you see when you have laying workers in an apidea.
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This is the pattern you get with a drone laying queen. There is a single egg in each cell.
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This is what you hope to see - a normal egg laying pattern.
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This is what you end up with when you start a queen rearing group.
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The season starts by making sure everything is free of nosema spores by treating with 80% Acetic acid for a week.
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Edit, I meant acetic acid not oxalic acid.
This is a frame chosen to take grafts from ( cue Papa was a Galtee drone)
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The larvae in the middle are a suitable age but you would not want to take them any bigger than this. I grafted over 50 earlier this evening into 3 colonies.
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This is a larva on the brush tip
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This is the larva after transfer to a cell cup
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Nice healthy larvae in a good bed of jelly for grafting
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gavin
26-06-2011, 11:58 PM
Fantastic (except for the laying workers). We had a group at our apiary this afternoon but it was in the rain so there were no cameras out. Marked queens, checked Apideas, took a queen from one for a nuc in need, replaced with another Q cell from a nuc that had appeared to be good but was superceding, blethered, joked, and generally enjoyed ourselves.
A small cell can sometimes produce a good queen.
A decent size queen came out of this natural cell and was placed in an apidea.
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This is the cage used for queen introduction after the queen has been laying for a couple of weeks in the apidea.
The two compartments are filled with fondant.
The cage is suspended between two frames for 24 hours before the tab is released to allow the workers to eat their way through the fondant.
The queen can only exit through the chamber on the left as the right chamber only allows the entrance of workers.
The bees enter first through the compartment on the right as it is shorter and they mix with the queen inside the cage before she is eventually released to the full colony.
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The queen is placed in the cage with a worker or two.
This queen was grafted from a larvae on 3rd of May and the queen emerged on the 15th.
She started laying on 4th June.
Her first brood was hatching yesterday in the apidea and the new workers were all dark - no yellow banding-which is a good sign.
I introduced her the the queenless part of a colony I split which has the brood and the non flying bees.
It is much easier to introduce a queen to a colony with only young bees.
The cage was put in the colony yesterday and I opened the tab today after checking the reaction of the workers to the cage.
I will do morphometry on the colony in the autumn to see whether she should be ruled out or in as a potential breeder - assuming the basics such as colony temperament are right.
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The graft frame and cups need to put in the cell raiser colony for a few hours before use to acquire the scent of the colony.
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During grafting I cover the cell raiser colony with a cloth to avoid clunking about with a crown board and unnecessarily crushing bees.
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Loading the apideas can be a chore. the worst part is shaking bees for filling.
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I have over 50 set out at the allotment.
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Producing the right sort of drone in large quantities is crucial. I checked several colonies earlier today and they were bunged with drones and had drone larvae all stages. If I doubt a colony I never let it make its own drone brood. I transfer over drone brood from preferred colonies and that keeps everyone happy.
I usually put super frames in the brood box for the bees to draw comb below. This year I have experimented by letting them draw their own comb in frames reinforced by fishing line. It seems to work well.
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gavin
27-06-2011, 12:23 AM
Are they BuzzyBee queen cages? I've been using Butlers but need something cheaper for distributing queens.
I had a drone laying nuc (not an Apidea, 2-3 frames in a Paynes box) which seemed to have gone fully queenless. Put in the very last of the current batch of queen cells from a decent colony on Thursday. The queen cell was worse than yours - tiny and entirely smooth. Today half a dozen eager beginners and a more experienced beekeeper or two had a look at the queen cell. It had a lid coming loose so we watched as a fully formed queen heaved herself out and staggered across the frame. She looked a little hunched (and also a bit pale) but maybe she'll straighten out.
Alan Jones dumped 100 of those cages in my lap after coming back from Stoneleigh. I don't know who he bought them from but they cost pence.
That cell was one of those I rescued from my disaster nuc on Thursday evening. It travelled home in the box of my puncture kit after removal of the patches and tube of glue. I brought home some workers as well and I opened the cell at home and put the queen in a cage with the workers. I was surprised how good she looked. She went into an apidea the next day. The one I left in the nuc was even better.
gavin
27-06-2011, 12:48 AM
My two transfers from Apideas have been straight into a Butler cage and held in by newspaper, then immediately into a needy nuc. Do you know how long you can leave queens on their own?
Virgin queens not long at all. Mated queens can live in cages for months within a colony apparently. A mated queen in a cage with attendants will last for ages if you make sure they have food and water. I think it is better to leave a couple of attendants in the cage with the queen. Sometimes I have introduced a queen in a cage and she has starved as they have ignored her. If I am introducing a virgin to an apidea I make sure to have a couple of attendants in the cage with her as virgin queens are easily ignored. the best way to introduce a virgin to an apidea is to drop her in through the floor and tip the cup of wet bees on top of her. That is a tip I got from Mervyn and it seems to work every time.
kevboab
27-06-2011, 01:51 AM
Thanks for posting the Apidea info Jon, starting to plan for next season now and drawing up another shopping list which I am sure the wife will be happy about. Want to be on the ball and get things moving earlier next year.
What do you reckon your %rate is regarding mating succesfully and how long do you leave queen in apidea once laying or do you whip them out quick to reuse apidea again.
What do you reckon your %rate is regarding mating succesfully
Last year which was my first season grafting and using apideas in volume mating success was around 50%.
It rains all the time in Ireland.
This year of the first 16 I set out, three queens went missing, two turned into drone layers and 11 are mated well.
I check every few days and if I find a queen is missing I immediately put in another queen cell or a virgin.
I have another 30 or so with virgins in and they should have flown on Saturday or Sunday with the brief spell of warm and sunny weather.
Another 15 or so had queen cells inserted yesterday, due to hatch today.
how long do you leave queen in apidea once laying or do you whip them out quick to reuse apidea again.
Whicking them out too early has been linked to early supersedure or rejection. There is Australian research to show that the optimum age for introducing a new mated queen is 28-35 days old. The pheromone level is low at first and then builds up.
I used a couple for requeening at the weekend and they had been laying for 21 or 22 days as the first brood was hatching in the apidea.
Edit. having checked the paper in the post below I think the best introduction times refer to the age of the queen rather than the number of days since she started to lay.
Here is the reference re. best age to use a new queen.
John Rhodes and Graham Denney
This project aimed to identify critical areas in queen bee production and introduction, that may be contributing to low acceptance and poor early performance being reported with commercially reared queen bees.
Beekeepers have not been satisfied with the introduction success rate and early performance of commercially reared queen bees for a number of years.
Queen bees from five commercial queen bee breeders produced in spring and in autumn were introduced into honey production apiaries belonging to three commercial beekeepers. Survival rates of test queens and older control queens were monitored at 4- week intervals for 16 weeks. Data considered critical to the survival and performance of test and control queens were recorded.
A significant loss of 30% of spring reared queens occurred compared to a loss of 13% of autumn reared queens. Control queen losses were 17% during the spring trial and average of 5% for the autumn trial. The age of the queen at introduction, numbers of spermatozoa stored in the queen’s spermatheca, Nosema disease, physical damage to the queen during transport, and external hive conditions were identified as factors, which may have contributed to the queen bee failures.
Further trial work investigated survival rates of commercially reared queen bees introduced into commercial honey production apiaries when the queens being introduced were 7, 14, 21, 28 and 35 days of age. The minimum age at which queen bees should be caught from mating nuclei lies between 28 and 35 days, this provided the premium survival after 15 weeks of 66.25% (60% when queens caught at 28 day and 72.5% when queens caught at 35 days).
This project is continuing and has lead to more beekeepers requeening colonies in the autumn and commercial queen breeders catching queens from nucleus colonies at between 28 and 35 days so the purchased queens have a better chance of survival.
http://www.beekeeping.com/articles/us/research_australia.htm
There are about 30 apideas with virgin queens at my allotment and this afternoon some were flying.
I witnessed a mating flight, the queen and all the bees from the apidea.
The queen fell short and the bees clustered around her.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE1rhEXfVRw
I searched around until I found the empty apidea. It was about 25 feet away. We had checked this one the previous evening with the queen rearing group and the queen was seen and no eggs or brood noted.
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I brought the apidea over to the cluster of bees and they marched in. I actually saw the queen go in while balancing the apidea in my left hand and recording the video with my right.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odVS3i1pEV4
When most of the bees were in I put the apidea back in its spot. The bees fanned at the entrance.
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Because the bees were fanning another virgin on a simultaneous mating flight accompanied by bees was attracted in by the fanning bees. The second empty apidea was about 10 feet away from this one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQPbnSM-VT0
I opened it up and found the bees balling a queen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ9DbkHwzfU
I put the ball in a dish of water and rescued the queen to a roller cage.
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I saw a second queen on the floor of the apidea.
The problem was that all the bees were now in the one apidea. I put the roller cage with the queen in a third apidea from which I had removed a laying queen last Saturday. I will release her tomorrow if all is well. She should be mated now. I will put an excluder on and watch for eggs in a couple of days.
The queen being balled was a far better one than the one I saw on the floor. Sod's law as usual
kevboab
28-06-2011, 11:42 PM
Lol. Good to see the bees keeping you on your toes.
It's Picadilly Circus at the moment. I still have over 50 apideas set out and most of them have virgins so never a dull moment on a warm afternoon.
That queen had better turn out to be a good'un after I went to the bother of extricating her from a ball of assassins. Having said that I sense an impending drone layer.
But even a drone layer has its place in the choir. One I removed from an apidea on Saturday volunteered itself to demonstrate clipping and marking to a beginner group earlier this evening and is now back home in a roller cage on top of my aquarium with a short left wing and a blue spot on it.
kevboab
29-06-2011, 12:28 AM
FIFTY !!! Maybe if I win the lottery and able to retire early I'll get the chance to get to that kind of level. Until then its prayer mat every night now for my half dozen nucs. Been a great learning curve this season but definately like the idea of mating boxes for next season and making nuc up once queen laying. Have you tried the Kieler box from modern ? Seems not a bad price although ive managed to find a site with apideas for £16.50.
They are not all mine. I have 18 and the rest belong to members of the queen rearing group.
Apideas are good investment. The first mated queen means it has paid for itself.
I haven't got as many as Jon. Queens will go to the wrong hive though. However Nucs get their queens back more often and are less liable to abscond than a mini-nuc in my experience. I think it makes sense to spread mini-nucs out far and wide so there is less chance of a queen going into the wrong one. With the weather we have, we get a couple of good days and all the virgins will go up and mate at the same time and then come back and not know where to go.
Hi Adam
The fanning at the entrance pulls the queens in, sometimes more than one unfortunately. I never intended to have so many in one place but people keep dropping them off.
I have rescued 3 clusters so far like the one in the video above.
Very few queens have actually gone missing. Of more than 50 apideas, I think there are only two or three without a queen.
I am using your record card in all of them and it is a godsend. There is no way I could remember which ones have queens and which haven't a couple of days later.
There are still those who don't accept that queens leave with a bodyguard of bees on a mating flight but I have seen this a dozen times now. The curious thing is that every bee from the apidea accompanies the queen. I wonder if under normal circumstances there is a fixed number of queen escorts, 500+, which is greater than the total number of bees in an apidea leading to its total abandonment as the bees accompany her. I wonder does the same thing happen in full colonies. It certainly happens with nucs as a couple of years ago I had two queens land short in almost exactly the same spot and the bees with them balled each others queen and killed both.
If a whole apidea of bees flies off with the queen there is no-one at home to fan for the return to guide them in so there must be a hgher chance of loss in these occasions. I think that thre is an advantage to have some brood in the apidea to 'anchor' some bees in the colony; once the remaining bees realise their queen has gone, some will go out to the entrance and fan her back me thinks. I was making a ham-fisted attemp at marking a queen at the weekend and she wriggled out of my fingers and flew off. First thing to do in this intance is to put the colony back together and leave, which I did. Within 30 seconds there were loads of bees outside fanning like mad as they knew she had gone. I would assume that a 3 week old queen in a small box is overloading the bees with her pheromone and they notice its loss very quickly. She came back and has now been clipped. She is still quite 'flighty;' I expect she will settle down soon.
I had a brainwave at the weekend. I have 9 apidea supers and I have worked out a way to convert them into apideas for holding mated queens which will free up 9 apideas to take more cells.
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A piece of flat correx with a half brick on top is your roof.
I am also making 45 extra apidea frames from correx. will post pictures later.
gavin
04-07-2011, 11:24 PM
Just thinking how thoroughly excellent it is to have such well-informed and sharing people on this forum. Thanks Jon and all. (only one glass of wine, honest!)
These are the best cells I have seen all year, large and very pitted.
Only 14/22 were started but these will produce some great queens, due to hatch on Friday.
I only set up the colony for queen rearing sunday week ago but it looks like a good one.
The bees in the cell raising colony are pretty much Amm as the colony is headed by a queen which hatched from a supersedure cell produced in one of my colonies with Galtee genetics. The cells are from the galtee daughter I have been taking most of my grafts from.
I put them in roller cages today and will move them to apideas on Thursday.
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The pitting is a characteristic often associated with supersedure cells and I find that a very good queen often emerges from a cell like this
ESBA Apiarist
05-07-2011, 09:20 PM
How do you fix the brown bases to the bar - glue, nails, wax? We used Superglue and it wasn't entirely secure.
Do you ever just stick the brown cups straight on the bar? I saw a picture - maybe even on here - of the brown cups stuck straight on the bar with wax.
Jimbo
05-07-2011, 09:39 PM
If you look at the base you will see small holes. I just nailed them to the top bar using the frame nails I have. I tried Aradite which worked up to a point but some would just fall off after a few years
I have used both small nails and drawing pins. It was pointed out to me recently that you can attach them with a single nail driven through the centre of the base plug rather than trying to get pins in around the base.
I think that there is an advantage to have some brood in the apidea to 'anchor' some bees in the colony
Adam - I would agree and amplify this comment, and it's not just important on mating flights. I focus on keeping my Apideas brood-right once i'm past the first cycle of queen raising - in a normal year (not this one!) I'd expect at least four cycles of mating per mininuc. Keeping colonies brood-right is important for keeping colonies contented, replenished, and reducing absconding, and of course avoiding laying workers.
One of the important management tasks, therefore, is the redistribution of brood during Apidea inspections. Colonies which have experienced queen failure (emergence/mating/laying) and which remain broodless will dwindle and lose cohesion; colonies with laying queens will rapidly run out of space. I like to keep my queens in Apideas until I see a good pattern of sealed brood. Hence moving a frame of sealed brood and stores into a queenless colony will bolster them and quickly enhance cohesion, provided there are sufficient bees to look after the brood.
Another important task is the management of adult populations. A weak and a strong colony can be safely swapped in the evening, provided that neither has a virgin awaiting mating. By 'strong' I mean stuffed with bees, plenty of sealed brood. This can also help in keeping the strong colony populations manageable (think absconding risk) and bolstering the weaker colonies so that they are better able to maintain queen cells, queens, or brood.
In both these operations, we are breaking some of the hygiene rules which have been drummed into us as good beekeepers: we are spreading brood and bees freely between colonies! It's about understanding the provenance of the bees and the nature of the risk. Recall the source of the bees in the apideas: they would have come from strong, healthy colonies, probably a small number (one?!) of colonies used to fill a large number of apideas. Thus we started with bees from a small number of known-healthy colonies. Provided we tolerate no signs of disease within apideas, then we can exchange material between our apideas. This assumes that we are familiar with the signs of all common diseases, and take the time to look for those signs, of course.
With these simple management steps I keep my apideas 'on the boil' throughout the summer. I'm running similar numbers to Jon, do not use the entrance queen excluders, and suffer from very low levels of absconding. I plan on 50% graft-to-mated success rate, and usually achieve 60-65%. This year the success rate is shockingly low, principally due to very erratic cell starter/finishers under the influence of fluctuating weather :(
Er, by the way: Hello :)
Dan, I concur with both your main points above, redistributing brood to apideas which have lost a queen and swapping places as well.
We have had atrocious weather this year but the queens are flying and mating which has surprised me. I put another 14 cells into apideas earlier this evening and I have 16 more to do tomorrow.
An apidea without brood or a virgin seem to go laying worker in about 3 weeks or less if unattended.
I put about 30 cells into apideas last Wednesday and Thursday. I think there was only one which failed to hatch.
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Hi Dan,
Hi Jon,
Yes I move brood about too. Small nucs can get congested very quickly.
I have one where - I suspect - a second queen flew in with her entourage. (There is a quite empty and queenless mini-nuc 50 feet away). It is absolutely stuffed so there is no way I can look for a queen. All I have to hand is a second mini-nuc which I have gaffa-taped onto the top of the original one. This will give them space to sort themselves out so I can then see what's what - although there will be brace comb all over the place.
Something I have noticed a couple of times with newly-charged mini-nucs and foundation only:- The bees have congregated in the food area and not on the comb with the queencell. On one occasion the queen emerged (a day later than her sisters) but never mated. On the other occasion the queen failed to emerege and was dead in the cell. My conclusion is that both the queens were duff and the bees knew it. (A good queencell will have bees crawling all over it very quickly).
For me, my planned queen-rearing has finished. I have some queens in mini-nucs; but probably more than I need.
gavin
13-07-2011, 11:07 PM
These are the best cells I have seen all year, large and very pitted.
Do I get any points for this one?!
G.
http://www.sbai.org.uk/images/champion%20cell.jpg
That is the queen cell equivalent of having hair extensions.
gavin
14-07-2011, 09:48 AM
Whacky! These bees have not been near the cannabis-supplemented rape field. There is another I didn't photograph with a big circle of comb over the Q cell. They'll need trimmed to fit into an Apidea later.
They do that sometimes and can even draw out the entire frame below the cells which remain entombed. They are still viable and just need a bit of trimming. You might get something looking like Cheryl Cole (http://www.headkandy.com/documents/blog.php?entry_id=1244824615) coming out of that cell in the first picture.
Hi Adam
There are still those who don't accept that queens leave with a bodyguard of bees on a mating flight but I have seen this a dozen times now. The curious thing is that every bee from the apidea accompanies the queen. I wonder if under normal circumstances there is a fixed number of queen escorts, 500+, which is greater than the total number of bees in an apidea leading to its total abandonment as the bees accompany her. I wonder does the same thing happen in full colonies. .
Jon, a thought worked its way through the porrige that's my brain yesterday. The avatar I use on the BBKA site with bees clustering around a hive may well have been bees coming back from a mating flight. (The armchair elsewhere is a different thing altogether!) It was 2 or 3 years ago; the hive had a virgin queen inside and a swarm issued - and came back. The queen was laying shortly after - a couple of days- from memory. I put down the swarm to something else at the time, although I wasn't convinced. I would have a strong suspicion that they followed her out on a mating flight. Why would a colony fly out and come back again?
I posted on the other mating swarm thread that a cluster which settled just outside my apiary which I tipped into an apidea two days ago had eggs in it today.
I also found eggs in another apidea.
The timeline of this one is as follows.
I had a large colony swarm in my garden on Friday 1st July. The queen was clipped and luckily I found her back inside. I did an artificial swarm and grafted into the queenless part that same evening. A dozen cells were started. The cells hatched on 12th and 13th July in Apideas and I found eggs in the first of them today, 26th July.
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I was reading through a Brother Adam book yesterday and he wrote of the average failure rate for queens to return from mating. I.e. for every 100 queens that flew, how many didn't come back.
What do you think the percentage is?
Some get lost on orientation flights before they even take mating flights as I often find queens have disappeared before they could have flown and mated, around 4-5 days from emerging.
I would say this year about 25% are getting lost but last year it was worse.
You lose a few at every stage- grafts not started, cells which don't hatch, cells which hatch but queen has deformed wings, orientation flights, mating flight, introduction to a colony.
Plus some get destroyed by wasps, or a careless beekeeper can let them starve and abscond.
I found one which had been overrun by wasps and there were only two bees in it. Fortunately one of them was the queen and I put her in a roller cage with a single attendant and placed this in an apidea from which I had removed the queen last week.
I released her after 48 hours and I noticed she was laying today. She had looked like a mated queen even though there were no eggs in the apidea which was overrun.
Brother Adams percentage was 18% failure. Bees that thend to drift (and hence rob) such as Italians were worse than others, so I guess their navigation is just not as good.
I would be happy with 18% losses but even bumbling around we have 72 queens mated and none of them look jaundiced either.
I am hoping to overwinter some apideas this year.
I have 3 doubles and this one is a triple with 15 frames inside.
Volume wise it is equivalent to about 3 BS deep frames.
Still plenty of pollen coming in as of 20/11/11
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWusT0llv8M
You can see some bees removing wax and debris in this one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa0_IGpOn4E
gavin
20-11-2011, 06:55 PM
Oh, I love a good bee video. It will be really interesting to see if you can get them through. Apideas are so well insulated that a triple-decker must stand a good chance.
Pale yellow pollen - wonder what that it?
Have you done morphometry on the colony in close-up? I know that it always depends on the light, but they look to me as if they have that halo of pale hairs on the thorax and broad tomenta that can point to hybridity with something exotic. They look like some of my bees which I'm happy to accept are mixed, ultimately coming from Drone Ranger's stocks via a couple of lovely ladies.
http://www.sbai.org.uk/Breeding/Carniolans.pdf
Have birds been pecking at the boxes? I also have some of these wee holes in our boxes. The Greater Spotted Woodpeckers usually fly straight over so I was going to blame blue tits.
The holes are pin holes. I pin a bit of plastic excluder to the outside to stop absconding in the summer.
Very few woodpeckers in Ireland.
The apidea is in my garden in suburbia so it could be anything.
I did a quick morphometry check on that one with drowned bees I fished out of the feeder, but I combined 2 apideas at the start of October so the population will still be mixed.
The queen in the apidea is producing all dark workers but there were quite a few yellow ones in the other apidea.
provisionally it looked ok.
Carnica is very unusual here. The problem with hybridization is Buckfast or Buckfast mongrels.
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Remember this post from last year.
http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/showthread.php?153-Your-gallery-of-2D-plots&p=2583&viewfull=1#post2583
Any Galtees I have seen have quite a wide tormentum.
With Carnica I always think it looks quite grey.
This post shows the difference in the morphometry
gavin
20-11-2011, 07:17 PM
LOL!! Pin holes then. Doh!
The importers sell bees and queens far and wide so I wouldn't rule out local carnica getting in on the act. I should take some more photos as part of my winter investigation into what is in my and the association's apiaries.
We had a local importer a few years ago who was making up nucs with Carnica queens from Slovenia.
He advertised them as 'Irish Carnica for easy handling'
I don't know how many he sold, probably no more than a few dozen nucs. He advertised in the UK bee press and sold some into England as well.
Most of them went to beginners and some of the nucs were found to have AFB.
By all accounts they were really poor nucs with only a couple of frames covered with bees so I doubt if many of them survived the first winter.
The default bee here is a mongrel tending towards amm with a bit of Buckfast in the mix so importing Carnica is definitely a bad idea.
I use this mesh to replace the inner cover when combining a queenright and a queenless apidea. The queenless one goes on top. I transfer the frames to an apidea super which fits neatly over the bottom unit.
Click photos for bigger images.
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The hole is plugged with fondant and it takes the bees a couple of days to eat through.
The smell of the queenright colony rises up through the mesh so there should be no fighting when they combine.
They first combine in the feeder compartment in the lower apidea - from which the queen is excluded.
Here is the latest addition to the apidea world - lovingly sponsored by Correx.
I have been messing around making spare frames from correx for a couple of years but have never managed to make a satisfactory one using the traditional materials of correx, Stanley knife and gaffer tape.
The frames need a side leg as with top bar only they will always attach comb to the side of the apidea and it breaks off if you don't remember to carefully cut it with a sharp knife every time.
The leg is hard to attach with tape as you have to leave a lip for the frame to sit across the apidea body.
Today I hit on the perfect solution
The humble nail!
The leg has to be cut across the ribbing in the correx so that the nail passes through several ribs and holds it tight to the top bar.
I am going to trial these starting tonight at the group and I don't think the leg will detach easily.
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The Drone Ranger
22-07-2013, 04:30 PM
They look like some of my bees which I'm happy to accept are mixed, ultimately coming from Drone Ranger's stocks via a couple of lovely ladies.
Actually Gavin you have been trying to improve your genetics whereas I have just really tried to improve the temper
I think yours will be more native now after a few generations
Also, where I am ,there's a lot of bees being moved around the area by hobby and Commercial chaps
more than 10 years ago I had bees from around Montrose that were very very black and a bit stingy but were otherwise very good
About that time I had a couple of hives with very black bees from an old chap round Motherwell so that heritage is still there in those bees
The local gene pool here is a very mixed bag so it's pot luck although W.J. has some very native looking bees this year,good for honey and really good temperament
fatshark
22-07-2013, 07:06 PM
Here is the latest addition to the apidea world - lovingly sponsored by Correx.
You crafty devil ... how do you fit he strip of foundation?
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk 2
drumgerry
22-07-2013, 09:10 PM
You crafty devil ... how do you fit he strip of foundation?
Might I suggest the humble screw would be even more secure?!
fatshark
22-07-2013, 09:11 PM
Might I suggest the humble screw would be even more secure?!
Fnarr Fnarr ;-)
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You crafty devil ... how do you fit he strip of foundation?
I never use a strip of foundation. Just put the new frame between two already drawn. Same principle as the fishing line frames.
Might I suggest the humble screw would be even more secure?!
Would need to be very thin and if you look at how the nail punches through the plastic it is not going to slip easily.
Give it a try. The side bars are actually quite hard to pull off.
Blackcavebees
23-07-2013, 09:33 AM
Would need to be very thin and if you look at how the nail punches through the plastic it is not going to slip easily.
Give it a try. The side bars are actually quite hard to pull off.
Was looking at these with interest last evening, ring shank nails (same price as smooth but not as popular) would increase the grip even more in case of heavy propolising
gavin
28-09-2013, 06:43 PM
So, after two months of use, did the nails hold? The plastic frames in my experience rarely get brace comb but if the correx variants are not engineered to the same specification (how dare I suggest that!) maybe it could be a issue.
Yep. The frames work 100%.
Kate Atchley
29-09-2013, 09:14 AM
I use this mesh to replace the inner cover when combining a queenright and a queenless apidea. The queenless one goes on top. I transfer the frames to an apidea super which fits neatly over the bottom unit.
Click photos for bigger images.
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The hole is plugged with fondant and it takes the bees a couple of days to eat through.
The smell of the queenright colony rises up through the mesh so there should be no fighting when they combine.
They first combine in the feeder compartment in the lower apidea - from which the queen is excluded.
Jon you make it so easy for us to follow with your pics. Whereas I took the easier option ... pieces of Qx cut from a plastic excluder and newspaper. The bees seemed to know what to do and I didn't find lots of casualties.
I had reasonable success this Summer using mini-nucs for first time. No absconding; about 75% successful mating; and fun it was too. But dealing with the nucs after they've delivered their queens for last time is a bit tiresome. United them over full colonies, wishing to give the bees and brood their full life-span, but found the bees up their storing honey in some of them, even with well-occupied supers below!
I have one stack of three mini-nucs still active ... with their Qx in place. But they are the standard Apideas rather than the supers, so they don't fit well. I leave the floor pulled 2/3 out and simple strap the boxes gently. The bees don't seem bothered.
Hi Kate
If you remove the floors completely they stack better and can be held together with gaffer tape. Block up any gaps with a piece of polystyrene and tape over them. For a better job, make a surround out of 4 bits of correx which fits tightly over the apideas to hold them in place. For an even better job, buy a few of the supers!
Kate Atchley
29-09-2013, 09:56 AM
Thanks Jon.
Correx city it will be!
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