Supercedure into Nucs

Soo, our little swarm has come on leaps and bounds over the past month or so but last week we found supercedure queen cells, somewhat annoying given that the new queen has only been in lay for a month or so. We took the chance to try and increase the number of colonies whilst keeping the existing queen. With one nuc and one full size hive split down to take 5 frames we transplanted the frames containing the queen cells into the Nucs, added a frame of stores and another frame of brood to each and topped up the rest with foundation.

If the faint sounds of Laurel and Hardy music can be heard in the background then it's in preparation for the next bit.

Initially we weren't sure if we had a late swarm on our hands, we couldn't find the queen, although we had eggs, and had moved one frame with a queen cell, a frame of stores and a donor frame of sealed brood from one of the other hives into a Nuc and left one sealed cell in the main hive. We removed the other cell and opened it up to see how far along the cell was, with the crappy weather it'd been nearly two weeks since we managed to inspect last. Judging by the very white looking, undeveloped queen inside we still had 4-5 days before the new queens emerged.

Coming back a couple of days later having sought advice that we were probably looking at supercedure we re-inspected the main hive. No eggs, could it be a late swarm after all? But we still had plenty of bees in the hive. The (rather dim) lightbulb went off and we checked the Nuc. Eggs! Typically we'd managed to take our elusive queen and put her in the nuc along with the other queen cell.

Not being too sure how to get a queen out of the Nuc back into the main hive we improvised and made up a second "nuc" out of a broodbox split down to take 5 frames with an entrance block only granting access to that side. We then took the frame with the cell out of the Nuc, leaving the queen, and added some sealed brood, attending bees,a frame of stores and a couple of frames of foundation.

In theory this now gives us 5 colonies. We might not get a lot of honey this year but hopefully these nucs will have enough time to build up for winter or we have an option to requeen one of the other hives that has a lot of chalkbood going on at the moment.

Never a dull moment when the weather is nice enough to do things!

Hallelujah!

I have a laying queen again. Quite how she got out to get busy with the lads given the weather we've had recently I've no idea. Maybe there's some geordie in her.

Our swarm looks like it might have swarmed though and very recently. 3 sealed queen cells, still 3 frames of space to play with and eggs in the brood. Given she's only been laying about a month she's not marked yet and we couldn't find her despite us both going over the frames while looking over each other's shoulders.

This time we've moved one cell into a Nuc with attending bees plus a donor frame from my colleague's hive, a frame of stores and two of foundation. The other we've left in place for now. We broke open the cell we removed and there's a very white, but definitely queen shaped pupae there which means, frankly that I've no idea how much time we've got before they emerge. Either way we intend to return on saturday or sunday, weather depending and see if we've got any new eggs in the hive. If not we know she's definitely gone and we can leave the remaining queen cell in place. In the meantime we try and get some advice as to what the flipping hell is going on.

Update...

I was kind of waiting until I had, hopefully, a happy ending to report, so I'll start where there is good news.

The swarm hive took it's own sweet time, but after 4 weeks the queen came into lay and despite an attempt to swarm seems to be settling in ok. The joys of working with foundation when there's a full flow on, the poor sods just dont seem to be able to draw foundation quick enough, pack the brood area with nectar and pollen, decide they're running out of room and start making queen cells.

My hive remains queenless. I last took a peek on Wednesday and still had my solitary queen cell, sealed, on the frame. We did have the seasonal bee inspector round which we both found incredibly useful, it's the first time anyone with any experience has looked things over since we started back in April. Thankfully there were no major issues to report but the hints and tips given, especially in the context of looking over hives that we're familiar with were priceless.

By my reckoning the queen should have emerged Yesterday perhaps today at the latest, so if the weather holds up, I'm hoping to go take a quick peek this afternoon, check she's emerged and see just how little brood area remains for her to hopefully lay in. There is a partially drawn super in place so I might try and see if I can coax them to move some stores into the super or might consider swapping some frames of stores for foundation to draw and hopefully leave some room for the queen.

Down to earth with a bump...

So far I have learned one very important lesson in beekeeping above all others. Just when you think you're starting to get the hang of things your bees bring you back to down to earth with a bump.

Last week I found queen cells. Rushing back to solicit advice from my internet mentors on the BBKA forums I returned the following day and took the, with hindsight, misguided decision based on the fact that the hive isn't full to simply knock down the queen cells and see if removing the QX from beneath the Super supressed the urge to Swarm. While removing the cells last week I found a sealed cell in the middle of one of the frames. At that point I stopped removing the cells and re-examined every frame to try and find the queen. There she was, the showers last week had presumably held them off from swarming and I thought all was well.

Yesterday I re-examined the hive. Reaching the brood nest, it was immediately apparent that I had no eggs in any of the frames and checking each frame twice confirmed my fears that I had no queen.

Further examination also revealed another Sealed queen cell and 4-5 uncapped cells. I removed the sealed cell as, given the time frame (it definitely wasn't there last weekend), my fear was it was an "emergency" cell made with an older larvae.

I've currently left the "best" 3 uncapped cells in place and my intention is to return tonight, reinspect the frame and reduce this down to a single cell in the hope of reducing the chances that I'll further weaken the hive by allowing cast swarms to leave.

I'm really annoyed with myself at the moment, I've lost a queen, and a number of bees although not so many that I actually realised they'd swarmed until I couldn't find any eggs and I could have prevented it by trying to manage their desire to swarm rather than bulldoze over it. Given their overall size, still only covering nine frames in total I didn't want to try and split them this year, but instead I've probably put them in a worse situation than if I'd just taken the queen, a frame of brood and a few bees and stuck them in a Nuc.

On a brighter note, our little swarm that we hived a few weeks back, now has a mated, laying queen in residence, so we do at least still have two queenright hives on site.

Bee Web Cam

Not mine, but if you point your browser to: http://www.sysonby.com/beecam/ You should find a webcam pointing at the entrance to a small observation hive. I believe that at night it switches to an Internal IR camera so you can see what is going on inside.

Very interesting just watching the comings and goings.

I found a bunch of queen cells in my hive yesterday so I'm going back in a bit to try and sort it out, more news later...

Bees in your hair.

Pop Quiz.
A bee flies into your hair, you hear its buzzing getting more and more frantic. What do you do? What do you do?

A) Attempt to brush the bee out of your hair using your fingers, an uncapping fork or that comb you carry for just such emergencies?

B) Administer a slap (or two) to your Noggin in the general vicinty of the buzzing noise

C) Enquire politely and calmly whether the guy stood laughing next to you will remove the offending bee.

D) Run off down the path, arms flailing, squealing "It's in my hair! It's in my hair" at a pitch audible only to bats and dolphins while your half de-veiled, Beekeeping SO attempts to catch you up.

In my experience the most effective are: B, C and A in that order.

D, while not effective at all, does provide significant entertainment to all around within sight/earshot of the afflicted party. No, I did not laugh as I removed the sting. Certain tender areas were well within striking distance.

Hiving the Swarm

Well, I was disappointed for a while that we didn't get to collect the swarm, then it turns out that it was a school playground. I know they can be about as gentle as they come, but I'm pretty sure the current Laurel and Hardy of the beekeeping world would have found some way to wind them up.

I did at least remember to take up the camera, unfortunately the location of the hive didn't really lend itself to letting them walk up the ramp and looking at them, there aren't a great deal of bees in the box so they might yet end up boosting the two smaller hives.

Swarm!

Fortunately not one of ours. As ever events conspire against us. Last time the allotment key was on its way to Oxford, this time the Mrs has the car with all my kit in it (ready for a swarm) and my colleague is in a meeting. While we were trying to figure out how to get to this one, still sat happily in a tree, a Commercial Beekeeper has agreed to collect it and hand it over to us later today.

Now where did I put that camera?

Playing with Photos

OK, I thought the page looked a little dull as is. I'm not entirely sure that sticking that particular photo behind the title pane necessarily works that well, but I'll leave it like this for now.

Progress!

Well the donation of a frame of capped brood from the other hive worked a treat.

Rather than swap a frame of eggs/larvae from mine I took a gamble on taking capped/emerging brood from the donor hive and replacing it with foundation from my hive. The donor hive is now definitely leaving, we're babysitting it until then and I'm trying to slow it down a little rather than have to try and super it with my kit. I wasn't 100% sure it was going to work and feared that I might not have enough bees to look after another full frame of brood, emerging or not.

Not only do they seem to have had no problems with the donated frame, theyve drawn out another frame and a half of foundation since last week. I'm now officially an owner of a hive of bees (rather than a Nuc) as far as I'm concerned.

Over the last couple of weeks I had been seeing two eggs in each cell. They weren't scattered around and I've spotted her Maj on every inspection. Someone did theorise that it might be a case of the queen getting "frustrated". Either way, every cell today contained a single egg again.

I've removed the feed from my hive as well. In the middle of Spring/early summer with the amount of forage that's available for them it seems silly to be topping them up with Sugar Syrup although they do seem perfectly capable of doing something with it as it's not being stored in any great quantity within the hive.

Playing at making videos

Don't think the BBC Natural History unit will be quaking in their boots just yet, but I offered to try and put together a few clips of bees doing their thing for some 5 year old kids. I've had to shrink it down and reduce the quality to make it fit here but hopefully it will come out ok. I think it might be time to add a tripod and frame stand to the wish list to try and reduce some of the shaky cam footage, it's not easy holding a camera in one hand and a frame of bees in the other while trying to look through the viewfinder wearing a veil.

I'm like the bees...

When it's raining I don't get to do much interesting, well not in terms of writing about at any rate.

The third hive on site at the moment is finally going to move to a new home. The owner had hoped to place it on his allotment but somewhere along the line fell foul of "The Committee". A visit from the president of the local beekeeping association, giving his seal of approval to the site, held no dice so we've let stay in situ until he found a new site or sorted the situation out.

A few weeks ago I spotted an ad offering to host a hive or two in an orchard that looked like it might be close enough to where he lived. As it's turned out, the site is ideal and both he and the owner of the land are looking forward to the bees arriving.

On the downside, his hive is much stronger than either of ours and we were hoping it was going to be a donor of brood frames into the smaller hives. We will at least get a chance to do at least one swap into each hive over the next two weeks before his leaves for pastures, or Orchards, new.

Basically, what we're looking to do is to take a frame of mostly emerging sealed brood, minus the bees, from his hive and swap it for a frame of mostly eggs and larvae in the smaller hives. As a rule of thumb, one frame of brood will produce 3 frames of new bees; so by swapping immature brood for emerging bees we'll get a quick boost to the number of bees in the smaller hives which will mean they can draw new frames for the queen to lay on sooner and hopefully help them expand a bit quicker than just left to their own devices.

That's the theory at least.

*drumming of fingers*

When it stops raining I'll go and so something interesting, I promise.

I did go to a Bee health seminar over the weekend, but I forgot my camera; not that a series of photos of beardy, grey haired people sat round a microscope or wrinkling their noses at frames of Foul Brood infected comb and brood would make for that interesting a picture.

With the big 40 looming in the not too distant future, it's nice to be a young maverick again. If only my knees didn't crunch when I sit down and ruin the illusion.

I am thinking of marketing a line of hair dyes called "Just for beekeepers", it will effectively mask your natural hair colour to match your grey.

Missed out on a Swarm.

Got a call from the Association swarm officer. He had a skep with a large swarm in it looking for a new home. In our apiary we have a [bait] hive, new frames all ready to go and another package of frames with foundation on order to prepare up another spare brood box into a hive ready to go.

Only problem was, key to the Apiary was halfway to Oxford, with my colleague, when he rung.

Having mulled my options over, torn because I really wanted to house the swarm and increase to two colonies, my aim for this year, I had to let the swarm go. If I couldn't find someone else up at the allotment to let me in, and more importantly be prepared to wait for me to finish and let me back out again, I'd have a problem in the form of a basket of bees and nowhere to put them.

Hopefully they'll have gone to a new guy without bees and another one will come up soon.

Starting to come along.

Today is the first inspection since we carried out the shook swarm that I've come away reasonably happy. There are at last signs that the colony is starting to build up again. The queen appears to be in rude health and is laying across 2 and half frames right to the edges. It's a little light on stores, but while they build up I'm keeping a feed on and there does appear to be plenty of pollen coming in.

These are my bees, there are many like them, but these bees are mine:


They've got a frame and a half of foundation to play with before the dummy board, which should be more than enough to keep them busy until the next inspection.

Before closing them up again I gave them a dust with Icing sugar. The varroa count has dropped like a stone in recent inspections, but I suspect this just means that it's now in the brood rather than on the bees. Post Icing sugar they end up looking like this:


and you get treated to the sight of "ghost bees" flying around the hive aftwards.

What was I saying about stings?

I've now managed to collect three in the last two days whilst not actually doing an inspection. The first two were up at the local association apiary meet. My hair was stuck in my eyes so I left the apiary to go sort it out, soon as I took my veil off two angry bees ambushed me and got me on the neck and cheek. They're still throbbing away but otherwise I don't seem to have too much of a reaction to them.

On this afternoon's inspection up at my own apiary I got stung before I even got into my kit. I'd already learned that bees love to fly in my hair so I don't tend to get too close the hives without kitting up first. Even so, rogue bee, right in the barnet and a sting to the side of the head before we could get her out. Still not dead which is a positive I suppose

Some Eye Candy.

I've been looking for an excuse to post some of these for a while. They're by a guy called Scott Thompson who frequents the BBKA forums and new posts are always a treat. This is just a brief taster: Just be warned, the full sized images are a screen filling 1200 pixels wide.



There are a huge number of photos in a similar vein of different Insect and reptile species and they are well worth a look. His Flickr page is Here

Playing the odds.

6 inspections on mine, a couple on the other hives and a couple of apiary days at the local association. Apart from the now regular occurence of a bee in the hair I've yet to receive a sting.

Having carried out a lightning quick inspection between showers this afternoon on a friend's hive and closed up we discovered a non leaky feeder, filled it with syrup and made moves to place the feeder on top of the crown board. It's a relatively small hive and we'd replaced two frames, where the foundation had dropped and they'd created a hell of a mess, with new frames of new foundation. No need for suits right? we're not taking the crown board off. As soon as we lifted the cover off the hole in the crown board a little stripey exocet of a bee shot out the hive and stung my friend. Feeder placed, with a new sense of urgency, we closed up and beat a hasty retreat.

Bait Hives

Given that everyone except us seems to have massive colonies of bees at the moment (I'll whine about the shook swarms that were done on both colonies leaving us with little room for manoever later) and is preparing for swarming season, we've put a bait hive out with our spare frames.

When we finally took over the apiary we discovered, in the back of the shed, a pile of old frames complete with old, scabby comb. While our aim is to get these cleaned up and ready for new foundation we decided to place a couple of these in the bait hive following a bit of reading that suggests a swarm looking for a new home likes to find a bit of old comb, presumably as it signals that bees once managed to live there successfully. We've also used a bit of Lemongrass scattered across the top bars. I know it should be oil, but we didn't have any and that was the next best thing.

We've got more spare broodchambers, but no spare foundation to fill them with, but I do have a scabby old home made nuc on site that we could fill with new frames and a couple of scabby ones, wonder if a Nuc would do as a bait hive?

Now we wait and hope we manage to attract a passing swarm.

[edit] A nucleus hive (Nuc) is too small apparently to be an effective bait hive, it needs to be about the size of a broodchamber and I just happen to have two kicking around that I was going to clean up. I'm going to put a couple of frames of the old comb into the "dirtiest" box containing a good amount of brace comb, propolis etc, and try and get hold of some lemongrass oil and see what we get. If I manage to get a swarm, then the other box will be cleaned up and ready to go by then (I hope).

Everyone is interested...

I've done my share of wierd activities in my time. I SCUBA dived for years, Mountain biked, pottered around in the Territorial Army and a few other bits and bobs here and there. Nothing, however, has piqued people's interest quite as much as when it emerges that I keep bees.

There's not one person that I've spoken to when it's come up that hasn't stopped dead in their tracks and wanted to know more. In some cases it's been related to the "OMG teh Bees are dying!!1!" coverage in the press, but for the most part people are just fascinated by these little insects and want to know more about the hive and, especially, the bees themselves.

There's also a, to me, surprising number of people who want to come along to my apiary and watch what I'm doing, I guess I need a spare veil.

Lots of Bee Stuff on the BBC at the moment.

Apparently it was first shown last year but caught "Jimmy and the wild honey hunters" where they packed some pig farmer off to Nepal to have a go collecting honey off the cliff bees (Apis laboriosa) which build huge combs hanging off cliffs.

Some amazing photography in the programme. with the combs out in the open, the bees flick their abdomens to warn off predators which results in these amazing "waves" rippling across the combs. Looks like an awful lot of work for a bit of honey though, don't think I'll be swapping my hive for a cliff face anytime soon.

Leaky Feeders

Two of the three hives on site, that aren't mine, have contact feeders in place. Both of these feeders have leaked and there is a [not so] nice wet spot of syrup leaking from the brood chambers of both hives. Wandering around yesterday I noticed a big fat wasp competing with the bees for a share of the sugar.

My concern now is that we're advertising the apiary to all and sundry with a taste for sugar that there's free food going and that hence there's a danger of the hives getting robbed out. I'm trying to get the other beeks to replace these feeders, or just remove them, as soon as possible.

The quickest inspection in the all the world...

I've been up to the apiary and while I technically did open the hive to stick a dummy board in, I didn't do a full inspection. As much as I wanted to from a personal interest point of view, I didn't see any reason to do it.

I know my colony is small, I know that this weekend is when the first of the new brood is starting to emerge so it's no surprise that just a quick visual check down the frames as I swapped a frame of foundation for a dummy board showed no immediate sign of expansion. That being said, they seemed "happier". There were more foragers coming and going and there seemed to be more bees on the two frames of brood.

My Varroa count has also nosedived. This has been a big concern to me over the past few weeks; the count I have, going by the books, indicates potentially big problems. But, I have a very small colony so I'm limited in what I can do. I've no drone brood, only a couple of frames of brood, Apiguard carries a risk, however small of stopping the queen laying and we're pyrethoid resistant in this neck of the woods.

It has been suggested that I might have a very high mite count because I have "hygenic bees". Yesterday I had two immature mites on the tray under the open mesh floor (it's permanently in place at the moment to try and help the bees warm the brood) from the past week. Today I had two, apparently adult mites on the floor.

Right now I don't know what to think.

In other unrelated news, we cut back the ring of brambles that surrounds the hives and discovered blackcurrants fighting for their lives, DIY ribena coming soon.

A New Home?

This blog was originally posted on the Avon Beekeeper's Website. I'm playing around with Blogger to see how it goes and whether it provides some of the shiny stuff that we don't currently have. I'm in the process of dragging some of the original articles over, kicking and screaming, and attempting to re-organise them so apologies if some of the original text doesn't quite "fit" the new format, I'll re-edit and update as necessary once I've figured things out a bit more.

"Who killed the honey Bee?"

An interesting documentary on BBC 4 last night. From within the beekeeping forums that I frequent however there is not a great deal of sympathy for the commercial 'keepers based on how the colonies were being treated and the state of the combs.

I also managed to catch, on the signzone, this week's Country File which was possibly a little more representative of the state of play in the UK, a shame the feature was only a couple of minutes long as it was perhaps far less gloomy.

Marking Some Queens

On Saturday afternoon we came back to work on two other hives in an attempt to find and mark the queens. We managed to find and mark one queen, the other proved a little more elusive. While we did find her, she scurried away before we could trap and mark her, with the smoker inevitably going out and the bees starting to get grumpy over the intrusion, we closed up and left her for the time being.

Why mark the queen? Here's a frame fresh out of the hive. Somewhere amongst that lot might be the queen, marking her makes it, in theory at least, that much easier to find her. It also lets you verify that the queen that you're looking at is the same one you saw in the last inspection:


In this hive the Queen was obligingly wandering around in a clear space:


Using a Press in cage to trap the queen:


And applying the mark, there is a colour scheme normally used to mark queens:
White for years ending 1 or 6
Yellow for years 2 or 7
Red for years 3 or 8
Green for 4 and 9
and Blue for 5 and 0

We'd lost the red pen and felt that a marked queen, even not following the above scheme was better than no mark at all:

Shook Swarming

Finally! After months of reading up we made the most of the nice weather and got stuck in with two afternoon sessions to get things prepared for the new season. My first hands on effort working with my bees and I think I'm hooked. I will admit to a degree of trepidation that having spent all this time and money getting things set up that I'd end up surrounded by bees and panicking or simply just deciding that I didn't like it.

The first task was to do the shook swarm into my new brood chamber, freshly converted back to bottom bee space.


1) Preparing the new Brood chamber to recieve the bees. What we've got here is one national brood chamber on top of a queen excluder, so it acts as a queen includer and reduces the chance that the colony might abscond as a result of the shook swarm. This will be removed once the bees have had a chance to establish their new home and give the queen somewhere to lay new brood.




2)The old hive, mid swap


3) Shaking the bees off the old frames into the new Brood chamber


4) All done, the brood chamber with an Ashforth feeder on top of the Brood chamber to give the bees some sugar syrup to encourage them to draw new comb on the foundation and make sure they've got something to eat.

If the Instructions look vague...

Get a second opinion before you start bashing nails in.

*sigh*, keen as mustard we took my newly built hive up to the Apiary over the weekend, intending to make the most of the weather and shook swarm my bees into the new hive. Upon removing the roof, Andy took one look inside and said "oh, so you're going with Top Bee Space then? Interesting approach but you do realise that all my gear is Bottom Bee Space?"

As you've probably guessed, I was intending to make a "standard", Bottom Bee Space, National Brood Chamber. In my defence I claim that the instructions were vague and I'd lined up the side panels on the chamber wrong, then used the recommended, judicious, amount of nails to put it together. In short it's not coming apart again any time soon.

After a period of head scratching I decided to use the Castellated Spacers, originally intended for use in the supers, turned upside down and nailed to the side panels to convert the Brood Chamber back to Bottom Bee Space. Naturally the pre-drilled holes intended for use when having them the right way up were in the wrong place and I then had to make new ones.

I'm not entirely convinced that 4 nails are sufficient or that the spacer used in this way will be strong enough to support the weight of the frames once they're full of brood and stores, so I may yet have just created more work for me later in the year, but I am at least back to having all my gear set up the same way.

Dont Panic Mr Mannering!

If you've done the beginner's course, read through advice the association warns you about attempting to keep bees on an allotment and are still on course to have your dream Apiary on an Allotment then my one piece of advice to you is simply:

Have a backup plan.

On Thursday night my "no problem", allotment apiary suddenly seems to be heading towards "no way".

While I've not discounted the possbility that I'll be able to retain the site, I'll have to be honest and say that it doesn't really sound like they want me there at the moment and with that in mind I've spent the past couple of days trying to find a replacement site for my bees.

Avon Beekeepers might seem an obvious place to have started, but, I was mindful of the fact that I'm still very much an unknown quantity as a new beekeeper, haven't made too many contacts yet and will undoubtedly need some help along the way; hence beginning my beekeeping career by admitting that I'd lost my apiary site didn't seem the best course of action.

So I've been busy contacting a few carefully selected local farms and suppliers to ask if anyone might perhaps like a few beehives on their land. I've also had offers from other allotment plot holders on different sites and, as grateful as I've been for the offers of help, I feel that going down this road carries too great a risk of simply moving the problem from one allotment to another. This afternoon, however, I received a reply back from an Organic farmer sounding quite excited at the possibility of having a few hives around.

With the feeling of elation that it's all back on again subsiding, I've spent the evening doing some research in preparation for going to meet them for the first time to try and make sure I'm in a position to answer any questions that they might have. My first port of call has been to the Soil Association's Organic Standards for Producers to try and make sure that there are no implications for their status by my putting bees onto or next to the farm. As far as I can tell, the only implications with regards to Honey Bees are if I want to sell the hive products as organic. Just to be on the safe side, I've also put a query on the BBKA forums to garner the opinions of Beekeepers with more experience than me.

Time to go back to the shop for some staples and hive straps I guess.

Starting To get Ready...

In discussion with Andy, the guy I am taking over from, about inheriting the hive he announced his intention to carry out a Shook Swarm on the colony prior to handing it over and while we have (a far too brief) period to work together. Never one to shirk the opportunity to buy some new toys I figured this to be a good opportunity to obtain a new hive, supers and frames in addition to the "standard" kit such as a jacket, smoker and a couple of hive tools (on the basis that one has probably already gone missing). My reasoning is simple, if we're going to transfer the colony onto new frames, in a different broodbox, then I wanted it to be "mine". I get to build a hive, put the frames together, know exactly what the bees are going into and have that symbolic exchange of putting the bees into my hive at the end of it, not to mention I should now have a decent amount of spare equipment for later.

Having spent some time browsing various catalogues and websites, including the excellent BBKA forums, I decided that I was going to go to a supplier and buy in person so that I could get advice and touch/try on gear that I was interested in, I also wasn't happy with any of the starter packages offered by the different suppliers.

So last weekend we set off to Masiemore Apiaries for no other reason than they appeared to be the closest being just north of Gloucester.

To cut a long story short, I emerged, one football match between Liverpool and Manchester Utd later with:

1. 1x National hive consisting of a broodbox, open mesh floor and roof.
2. 1x Framed Queen excluder
3. 2x Supers (literally Latin for "on top of" or, in layman's terms, where the honey goes)
4. 1x Beekeeper's Jacket with Fencer type veil
5. 2x Hive tools (one has already evaporated remember)
6. 1x Uncapping fork for Varroa inspection
7. 1x Miller feeder (This could be a supplier specific thing, Thornes have an Ashworth feeder. It's a tray that sits on top of the brood/supers and holds feed)
8. 1x Crown board with 2 porter bee escapes fitted that have so far resisted all attempts to get them out without breaking them.
9. Several bags of nails
10. a Smoker in a cage with a hook for catching on pockets.
11. 12x DN4/Hoffman (self spacing) Frames
12. 20x SN1 frames
13. Not enough spacers for 2 supers
14. Wired foundation for all frames.
15. And one of those bulldog clip queen catchers, which is my first nod to gadgetry but also one I can see little legs getting caught in. I bought it as much to remind me what the alternative was of picking up the queen as necessarily wanting to use it.


This package set me back just short of £370. I dont claim it as a perfect starting pack but I do feel that I got a better deal than the starter package Maisemore offer for about the same price. Maisemore did say, when we were there, that their starter package isn't a "deal" in so far as it offers any discount price on what's being offered, it's what they consider to be a reasonable bundle of equipment to get you started and it's for that reason that I'm glad we went. It's not my job to advertise one particular supplier and I've looked at numerous different places such as Thornes and BeeBasics and in some parts they're all more attractive on price than others but I really felt that I needed to go, be there in person, be able to pick stuff up, try it out, talk to the guys and gals running the place and make sure I had stuff that felt comfortable.

I was advised to start, in the supers, with 10 frames in the first year and reduce to 9 frames in the second. With hindsight I'm lacking in spacers, both to do 10 frames on 2 supers or do 9 the following year. I'm hoping that this isn't something that will come back an haunt me.

Discussion on the BBKA forum suggests that I should actually consider 11 frames, DN4/Hoffman or otherwise, and a dummy board which, naturally, I don't have. Regardless, I will cross that bridge and avail myself of Royal Mail's special delivery if I have to soon(tm). By the end of sunday, that big pile of wood, vague instructions and sense of panic that you've done it all wrong looked like this:

Yes, the Hobbits have grown and they're coming for your bees!

Ok, so ignoring the big hairy lump, what we actually have is the roof, the brood box and the open mesh floor. The big pile of sticks on top of the roof will, later in the evening, turn into 11 more of what I'm holding once I've got the rest of the Foundation out of the boot of the car.

Minor points (like have I got a dummy board, will I be wearing flip-flops) aside, in theory I'm ready for bees!