New Products
We have added a section of Hygiene Products to help promote cleanliness and quality in honey and other hive products.
A light weight smock is also now available. The Observer Jacket is ideal for use by visiors to your apairy or for use by Beekeeping Associations during Open Days when introducing members of the public to beekeeping. Find it in the Adult Clothing Section.
Overseas Shipping
We can now ship all sizes overseas. See the Home page for details.
May Beekeeping
This is the month for swarms! Having a clipped queen is a very good safeguard against losing all your bees so if at all possible all your queens should be clipped. Here in Devon the Oil Seed Rape will fade by the middle of the month and honey should then be promptly extracted.
Every beekeeper is encouraged to rear their own queens so start this month if you can. There are many methods but all rely on the natural instinct of the bees to raise a queen as soon as they sense they have lost their current monarch. This can be done by physically removing the queen or by simply separating the queen in a second brood chamber using a queen excluder and several supers in between the two brood chambers. Ensure the brood chamber without the queen has eggs and leave the rest to the bees. Feed the bees throughout the process to ensure well developed queens.
April Beekeeping
This is an ideal month to carry out a shook swarm, either to combat a bad varroa infection or when the combs are old or clogged with ivy honey. Although CSL won't yet advise the shook swarm as a preventative treatment for brood disease, particularly EFB, having clean, fresh comb is a very good basis for good, disease-free beekeeping. Choose a warm day and a strong colony - if the colony of bees is weak look for reasons why and correct it before carrying out a shook swarm. A weak colony will not respond to this treatment. Feed a medium sugar solution (1Kg per Litre of water) and leave a frame of unsealed brood in for about a week - this will trap most of the varroa still on the adults (the phoretic mites) providing the frame is removed and destroyed before adults start to emerge from the frame.
March Beekeeping
Our bees are flying well, even in low temperatures and on the 18th of March we spotted a field near by planted with Oil seed Rape which has now started to rapidly turn yellow. The bees will find this soon so time to dig out the Supers!
February Beekeeping
As mentioned last month, be prepared to feed and if you plan to set the bees on OSR a stimulative feed during this month will ensure they are ready when the crop comes into flower - in this part of the UK the fields were turning yellow in early March last year and the signs are this year will also be an early Spring.
January Beekeeping
January is supposed to be the time the beekeeper just needs to check the hives and ensure they are safe but with the increasingly early Springs we have now the bees will start to become active early in the year and it is essential to check they have sufficient stores. Bees rarely starve in the depths of winter but during the coming months it is a real threat.
December Beekeeping
December may be the time when the bees are supposed to be tucked up for the winter, but here in South Devon they fly on almost any day it is not raining hard. The general view is this is not a good thing - too little if any forage and flying uses up more stores than if the bees remained in a tight, thermally efficient cluster. However, short of nailing a piece of wood over the hive entrance or putting the hive in a cold store the bees will choose when to fly and there is little the beekeeper can do about it.
For the last couple of years I have applied Oxalic Acid at the end of December, 5ml per frame of bees. It causes a fair mite drop over several days and does seem to ensure the bees go into the Spring relatively mite-free. As our mites are resistant to the original treatments most people in Devon use Apiguard in August as their main varroa treatment. This year I used Formic Acid in September on half my hives and the results, in terms of mite-fall were very promising - better than the Apiguard treated hives. We shall see in the Spring how the hives have done. The acid was applied to a cardboard sheet that exactly fitted over the frames in the brood box. The dosage was 20 ml applied each day for three days. What I am still searching for is an effective Spring treatment. Lactic Acid is supposed to work but I haven't found anywhere I can buy it locally. The alternative is icing sugar, which does knock mites down, I have witnessed it being used, but whether it has much of an impact remains to be shown. Perhaps the most effective spring varroa treatment is a Shook Swarm. I did this on one hive last year but then messed up the experiment by adding a frame of brood from another hive without thinking, so re-introducing varroa. I shall try again this year, hopefully in a more controlled experiment!
Best wishes,
John Laidler
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