Hello

My name is Alan and my wife Margaret and I did our basic bee keeping course in late 2009. We then bought 2 x WBC hives and got them ready for the arrival of our first nuclei in June 2010 followed by the second nuclei 3 months later. We keep them at the bottom of our garden.

We were allocated a “Bee Buddy” by our local club but he only ever came round to help on one occasion and since then we have learnt by reading books and watching videos.

We did not take any honey off the bees in 2010 and at the end of the year we bedded them down for the winter with some syrup and 2 x doses of Apiguard.

In 2011 we took off 180lbs of honey and last year (2012) we took of 50lbs so judging by reports in general our home 3 miles north of Peterborough city centre is a good foraging area for bees.

We have made 3 big mistakes (and numerous smaller ones) in our beekeeping and in the hope that our experiences may help prevent others making the same mistakes I have listed them below:

1. We started off with a small brood box and quickly realised that we were running out of room so started operating a double brood box system on both hives. This was a big mistake and it took months to get them working properly again in a larger brood box.
   
   
2. We did not check our bees early enough in 2011 and by mid April when we opened them up there was honey everywhere (what a mess) this resulted in a lot of comb destruction to separate the hive for checking. We immediately fitted a super on each hive and had 4 x supers of honey off each hive by the end of the year.
   
   
3. In 2012 we were plagued with our bees swarming. This resulted in building 5 x new hives to house the swarms. Luckily one of my hobbies is carpentry and I was on one occasion making a spare hive from plywood when our bees were still in a neighbour’s tree. On that occasion I somehow managed to kill the queen, but luckily they remained in the hive until I managed to purchase a queen from Mike. I had actually put a frame of brood in the new hive and they started making queen cells (there were around 25 queen cells on the single frame).

Last year Margaret bought me a huge reference book for my birthday. ”The Hive and the Honey Bee” (ISBN 0-915698-09-9) It cost nearly £40.00 but to us it is worth every penny. We also bought 5 x videos and I would recommend “An Introduction to Bee keeping” with Paul Metcalf.

To date we have not lost any hives through the winter, although last year we did have one hive that literally swarmed to extinction. All our hives look healthy and on warm days they are bringing in pollen which hopefully indicates the presence of brood.

Our priorities this year are to get the supers on at the right time and to practice a method of swarm control which is acceptable to both us and the bees.

Regards

Alan & Margaret