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Mendoza, seventh year, 24 colonies, and spring is properly here. The stone fruit is finished, colonies are on eight to ten frames of brood, and the first swarm cells have…
Tuscany, fourteen years, 40 colonies. My queen supplier opened his books last week for next spring and I've been caught out enough times to take it seriously. My pattern …
North Carolina, third year, six hives — five fine and one that I now realise has been queenless for a while. No eggs, no young larvae, a scattering of drone-sized cells i…
Tyrol, eighteen years, 24 colonies. I'm writing my replacement list for next spring and I want to argue about the received wisdom, because I keep hearing "requeen every t…
Flanders, six years, fourteen colonies, and for four of them I've deliberately run a mix: six with bought Buckfast queens and the rest headed by queens raised from whatev…
Devon, fourth year, seven hives. Two of them are simply too small. Both have laying queens and no obvious disease; both cover about three and a half frames of bees and bo…
Kent, third year, five colonies. A local breeder had a few late mated queens going and I bought one on impulse, thinking that if a colony turns out queenless in March I'l…
Uppsala, third year, four colonies. I had a quick look under the crownboard on Wednesday because one hive felt oddly light, and while I was in there I saw an unmistakable…
Twenty years in Bavaria, 30 production colonies and a small breeding effort. October is when I actually decide next season's queen programme, not April, and I think that'…
Kent, third year, five colonies. Did my last proper inspection on Sunday in a warm spell and found something I've only read about: two laying queens in one hive. My green…
North Carolina, third year, four hives. Last full look yesterday before I mostly stop opening things, and one hive threw me. Three of my colonies kicked their drones out …
Yorkshire, first year, two hives, and I thought queen cells were a spring problem. Went into hive two yesterday for a quick stores check and found three sealed queen cell…
Kent, third year, four hives. Did what I thought would be a quick last brood check yesterday on hive two and my blue-marked 2025 queen is nowhere. Instead there's an unma…
Five years, nine hives in Quebec. One colony superseded in August and must have lost the virgin, because this week I found it: several eggs per cell, eggs stuck on the ce…
Second year, four hives in southern Ontario. Inspected hive 3 yesterday and found bullet-shaped domed cappings scattered all over the worker comb, not in a patch, just he…
Second year, three hives outside Galway. Hive 2 has lost its queen. Last saw eggs on the 28th of August; Sunday's inspection found no eggs, no larvae, only a handful of s…
After reading the uniting thread last week I finally did it: found and removed the queen from my five-frame colony in Kent, put newspaper over the strong colony's brood b…
Third year in Uppsala, four colonies. Inspected yesterday in a rare sunny afternoon and one colony has almost no brood: two palm-sized patches of capped brood on one fram…
First-year in Yorkshire, and I've seen it repeated everywhere like a commandment: take the queen excluder off before winter. I'm happy to obey but nobody's actually expla…
Confession thread. I've been nursing two struggling colonies all August — one with a queen laying a patchy dinner-plate of brood, one that never built past five frames af…
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