Category: Beekeeping

Too Windy for the Bees 1

Too Windy for the Bees

I think we may have had a lucky escape with the bees this morning. It’s been blowing a hoolie here all day, after starting to do so last night. I took a quick look at the hives this morning and all looked OK, although it was dawn so the light wasn’t great and I was only...

Honeys for tasting 0

Honey Show

After spending all day baking and decorating cupcakes on a Saturday it was time for the competition at the ABKA Honey Show on Sunday. Actually, we had a few things to do before the show, I went for a run and swim in Machynlleth and Morgan went to Junior Triathlon Training for an hour afterwards giving Anna and...

Cake Decorating Supplies 4

Bee Cupcakes

With the Annual ABKA Honey Show on Sunday, we had to make an effort to prepare our entries. We didn’t really have enough honey to enter and hadn’t made anything from wax. No candles, no combs of honey and even the cookery class that we were looking forward to was different this year. The various...

Ynyslas Honey 2

Honey Harvest

It may be a fairly pathetic harvest in comparison to some, but seeing as we started the year with no bees and had to wait a while thanks to the poor Spring for a couple of nuecs I don’t think we’ve done too badly. Especially seeing as the queen died in one of our colonies...

A Fera Bee Inspection 3

A Fera Bee Inspection

We had our first visit from a FERA bee inspector yesterday. There has been a recent case of American Foulbrood in the area. American foulbrood (AFB), is a highly infectious and destructive bee disease caused by the spore- forming Paenibacillus larvae ssp. larvae. It is widespread and a huge problem in America, but thankfully fairly rare here in...

Hives 1

Busy Beekeeping Day

We had a busy day yesterday full of all sorts of things. Triathlon Training in the morning, followed by beekeeping in the afternoon. The triathlon training finished a little late so we then had to rush off to Llanafan for a beekeeping meeting. There was no way we’d make it by 2pm so we let them know...

Donating Eggs 2

Donating Eggs

Well, the bees are up to no good again. Clettwr, the stronger of our two colonies has been struggling. We found their queen dead at the bottom of the hive just over a month ago, but they had already started raising a new queen and had some queen cells on the go at that stage....

Bees 0

Honey, but no queen

Morgan and I have just carried out a bee inspection on our two hives. Clettwr The first hive (Clettwr) is the one in which the queen died a few weeks ago. We last saw here on July 1st when all looked goo, but on July 7th found her dead at the bottom of the hive....

Anna 0

Days 16-18 of Summer – Playing on the beach

Yep, that’s 18 days of summer so far and counting. Admittedly yesterday wasn’t quite as nice as it had been as it was now a bit muggy but the temperatures still made it to 25.1°C which is pretty warm for these parts. It was also a Monday which is never much fun after a nice...

Dead Queen Bee 5

Death of a Monarch

There’s always something with those pesky bees! Today’s inspection turned into what we though was going to be the performance of an artificial swarm. The first hive we inspected had some queen cells in. All were uncapped but had some well developed larvae in them so there was only one thing to do. The plan was to find the queen, perform...