New Adventures in Beekeeping

[raynerd]

Hi guys, in light of Joules post, I thought I'd do a quick post to show what I've been up to and see if we have any other beekeeper here.

Video of my first hive inspection. This is a very small swarm that was caught. We since have a second hive with a 6 frame nuc installed.

This is the construction of a hives national flat pack:

[Joules]

Mine was more Bee abuse, after digging them up I put some comb with a few bees in a large zip lock bag and inspected the Bee's, they all had Varroa     I squeezed some honey out of the comb and used a tooth pick to take a swab through the bag and tasted my local honey, yep nice, they must have collected from the local gardens.  After that the bag was opened, all the comb put on a flag stone and watched the Bee's remove all the honey and pollen they had from the comb.  Next day the comb was virtually clean except for the unborn.

[mattinker]

I wish there was a like button! Just a "like" and an encouragement!

Regards, Matthew.

[Manxmodder]

Don't know if you guys are aware of this,but the Isle of Man is classed as one of the very few Varroa disease free places in the British Isles.

Our local Bee society is very proud of this fact and strict importation restrictions apply to prevent the disease from colonising here.

One of the great values of this being we have official Varroa free status and export Varroa disease free swarms from the Island.

There's always the potential of one asshole to spoil it all though.
We're now having to go through our status checks all over again.

Makes you wonder what goes on in some peoples minds
Link: http://www.iombeekeepers.com/no-one-owned-importing-bees-island/

OZ.

[Joules]

Chris, any plans what you will do with the wax you harvest (most sell back to Thornes or exchange for new comb).  I used to buy kg's of wax for various activities over the years, making polishes, applying to tool edges, blending for lost wax use, and making candles, they smell great in the winter.

[raynerd]

No, I wasn't aware you could sell it back to Thornes! Looks like with all those workshop uses, I'll get some sales in here :-)

Chris

[Joules]

An even MORE important use of your final product.  In this example the honey was sourced in Norfolk, I still have enough honey to make one more batch (I hope)



This is just coming up ready after 2yrs storage, it takes some patience to make and age.  Ignore the last dates on the demijohn as they got rubbed off the previous demijohn during the final racking and I ended up just adding the last date.  I will transfer it to bottles next month      I learnt to make the stuff using the cheapest blended honey from the discount supermarkets, before using the best honey I could find.  Champagne yeast seems to give best results, though I have used bread yeast and got good results too.

[Will_D]

If you are into mead then here's some great links:

http://www.nationalhomebrewclub.ie/forum/index.php/topic,9340.0.html

Also go up one level to our Cider/Perry/Mead and wine threads.

We had about 20 entries into the Irish national HB championships.

I got a bronze for a Rose Hip Mead.

[John Swift]

they say you learn something new every day

just watched part of a channel 4 program about icing sugar

and it showed a clip dusting bees with icing sugar to control varroa mites

the idea being as the bees cleaned each other the mites would lose their grip and fall off and land in the bottom of the hive

John