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Well Gav may well have had good news re. the false alarm about EFB but I also had a good day.

I checked 10 apideas and found eggs in 8 of them.
This included the one I left closed up for 12 days and the two which absconded at the end of last week which I found stuck in bushes.
I am sticking with my theory that this is some kind of signal failure leading to all the bees leaving with a queen on her mating flight.
I saw the two remaining queens as well and they ...

I looked at a few apideas yesterday and found eggs in three so the queens must have flown between Wednesday and Friday in the good spell of weather. That's 20 days from queen emergence so just in the nick of time as 25 days is regarded by many as the date where a queen turns drone layer.
I am assuming they are not laying drones and will know for sure when they start to cap the brood.
I have queens in eleven apideas in this batch and am hopeful now that the majority of them will start ...

I had 15 cells due to hatch last Sunday 29th May and all of them turned out duff.
I opened quite a few and all the queens were dead at the purple eye stage which I reckon is about 4 days off hatching.
The cells had developed normally and were sealed at the right time – 4 days after grafting. I can only speculate that they were chilled. We had a huge storm on 23rd May and temperatures were low all week. Some beekeepers even had colonies blown over. My dad had one with two supers on ...

It's taken me this long to get my breath back.

My apiary buddy was away last weekend so asked me to take a look at his hives while he was off sunning himself in warmed climes. Even in the very south of Scotland here in Bristol the weather wasn't great and I might have had a few friends round for tapas and a wonderful game of football the night before. So it was a bit later than I anticipated by time I got to opening up the 8 hives that were there and figuring out how ...

Another very windy day out there, so that's my plans to prepare to move a couple of colonies for rasps (a first for me) down the tubes. I tried last night, after a very fine beginners meeting elsewhere when a dozen brand new beekeepers were treated to a chorus of queen piping amongst other delights, but was beaten back. Beaten back?! Yes, I really need to requeen that one. I had split it on Friday and wanted to reunite after removing queen cells (this one isn't going to contribute queens to the ...