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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…
Second year in İzmir with three hives, and yesterday was awful. The hills are bone dry, nothing has flowered since July, and my smallest colony was light, so I made 2:1 a…
Second season in Ontario and my first time keeping a fall super on. Two hives, one medium each, and the goldenrod-aster mix came in like a freight train the last three we…
Supers came off my five colonies in Devon last week, all extracted, so Apivar is going in this weekend for the first time — I've used thymol the last three autumns and wa…
First-year beekeeper in Minnesota, two hives from packages in May. This week I've been finding twenty or thirty dead drones in the grass in front of both hives every morn…
Spring check-in from the Lowveld. The aloes carried us through winter and now the litchi and macadamia orchards are flowering, with the first eucalyptus stands not far be…
First autumn feed here in Yorkshire and I've made a hash of it. Two colonies, both a bit light after a rubbish August, so I mixed up 2:1 — 4 kg of granulated sugar into 2…
One year ago today I installed my first package in a snowy Minnesota April — okay, the anniversary math is off, it was the day I ORDERED them, but let me have this. One c…
Quebec, five years in, and every September the same bar fight breaks out at my club: the wrap-early crowd says get insulation on before the first cold snap stresses the c…
Second-year in Galway. At Tuesday's association meeting one of the old hands said "feed early or feed never" and everyone nodded like it was scripture, and I nodded too, …
Found my weakest colony dead this week — the one I'd been watching since the queen went patchy in July. Post-mortem: maybe two hundred dead bees, a little scattered cappe…
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…
Decision needed by the weekend. A farmer friend 40 km east has field margins thick with goldenrod (nawłoć) just hitting full bloom, and he's offered me space for six hive…
First ivy flowers are opening around Cork a week or so ahead of usual, and the bees found them before I did. Which means it's time for the annual ivy argument, so let's h…
Third year in North Carolina, first year with a hive scale, and I finally get why people obsess over these things. The goldenrod turned on around August 25th and my scale…
Southern hemisphere check-in. Three weeks ago my colonies were tight clusters ignoring me; yesterday's inspection found the two strongest wall-to-wall with bees, drones o…
Winter project here in Minas Gerais while the colonies are quiet: I've been scraping propolis all year off frames and traps and finally have about 200 g of the good green…
September in Provence means the yellow-legged hornets have found my apiary again. The secondary nests are at full strength now and the hawking has started — hornets hover…
Every spring this forum fills with dead-out posts, and most were decided in September. So here's my list from 22 years and a lot of scraped bottom boards, in order: 1. Va…
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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