Wasps

Hello Steve that's amazing. I doubt very much that wasps will affect your big hive. With respect to the smaller hive I suppose it could be wasps but unfortunately you will never know. How long is it since you last checked it?

I would be interested to hear what you think of the Langstroth hive.

Since replying to your post I have had a look at your introduction and note that you have been keeping bees for 25 years. Presumably you have had a few different hives in your time. How do you think that the different types compare with each other. Also how do you process your honey. Do you have enough hives to make powered spinning a good proposition? 

What about wax? Have you made a solar wax extractor? I am in the process of making one insofar as I am having a stainless steel tray specially made, but so far I do not have a firm design other than copying one which a bee keeper was displaying at the Halifax Agricultural show a couple of weeks ago. 

Hello Steve. That all sounds very interesting and I am glad to hear that there is someone else out there who is willing to experiment and doesn't take everything as written in tablets of stone.

I presume by a steam cleaner you mean one of the small domestic hand held ones for about £50-. Are they any good?


This year for the first time I have given all my wax and super frames back to the bees to extract the last vestiges of honey. I am hoping to get my wax extractor finished before the summer expires in order that I can try cleaning frames in it.

If you have read my article of a couple of days ago you will know that I have done away with my honey spinner, and I don't use foundation in my supers anymore.

We have a lot of rape seed around here and I still have a 60 litre bucket full of all the cappings (about 50% honey) from 2011. It is as solid as a rock. I had thought of using it as a basis for making wine, but now I have decided to make a compartment in my solar wax extractor specially for melting that sort of stuff, again, like you,with your steam cleaner I don't know if it will work.

I to tried brood and a half (well slightly more than half). Why do these so called breeder insist on selling nuclei on small frames. Of course being new to beekeeping I didn't know any better and bought my hives with standard brood bodies and then ended up buying some more larger ones as they just weren't large enough to prevent the swarming instinct.

Another thing that I find hard to understand, or maybe I am missing the point, is why do the majority of bee keepers leave their supers on till the end of the year. If they are continuing to do bee inspections that's a lot of lifting. When I do an inspection I look in the top super and remove any full frames, then I take that super off and then remove any full frames from the second super before taking that one off and placing it on top of the original one. Then I do my inspection before placing both supers, which are now considerably lighter, back on top.

I have a small stainless steel drainer which I use if I have only took about 6 x frames off, any more and I use my big drainer the details of which are in my post "News from RoadRunners Apiary".

My significant other bought me a huge reference book for my birthday last year. One of our problems is that we like to go away in our campervan, but obviously to guard against swarming we tend to limit trips away to a maximum of 12-days.

The reference book suggests that if you are going to be absent for up to a month or so that the day before you go on holiday you find the queen and kill her. The hive then starts to raise a new queen from new larvae and by the time the new queen has emerged and had her mating flight etc you are back off holiday. It all sounds a bit drastic but I think that I will try it out on one hive next year.