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Well, I think my Nuc has gone from virgin queen to swarmed in about 6 days.

I will admit to placing a test frame in it last thursday, I'm also absolutely adamant that this frame had no queen cells on it as it came out of the 14x12 and was on standby in case the 14x12 was showing signs of trying to swarm again so I could get the queen out into another Nuc (my Nucs are standard National at the moment) so it'd already been checked once to ensure it had no queen cells on it and I checked ...

When setting up mini nucs, I am never sure how much water to give, and thought of putting in a block of oasis as used by flower arrangers, and some way of keepig it topped up.
Has anyone ever done this

Thanks

This bee caper can take up a lot of your time. 8 solid hours today and a good few yesterday as well.
I made a correx nuc box in the morning and then headed up to the bees.
I have queen cells due to hatch on Tuesday and I have just split a colony into four parts to take four of them. I have 7 apideas but I reckon there is always a better chance of getting a queen mated in a nuc than an apidea.
I was going to bring apideas to a Bibba member's apiary to get mated but I had an e-mail ...

They're playing with me I tell you, I can hear them sniggering when I pack up to leave.

The brood half (national) of my artificial swarm has a nice, new laying queen. Very new, there was maybe half a frame of eggs when I took a look this afternoon to pilfer a couple of frames of stores for the new Nuc as I'd managed to scrounge a spare Nuc box. Opening up the difference in temperament was immediately noticeable, so while I was in there I thought I'd confirm that what I thought was ...

I think I've finally managed to get my basic assessment sorted out on the second attempt. The first attempt had to be abandoned when it turned out the colony we were inspecting had EFB! I'm glad I spotted a problem but had to be honest after the event and admit that if it were my own hive I probably wouldn't have called the bee inspector at that point. Fortunately my assessor is also an SBI so the problem was spotted immediately. It has made me re-think how I approach inspections and what I'm ...