Feeding

Feeding Colony 17

Submitted by will on Sat, 08/06/2019 - 05:52

I don't usually feed my colonies. I'm especially cautious about feeding swarms because they arrive with honey which can contain spores from a variety of diseases including the devastating American Foulbrood. The usual advice is to leave the bees alone for a week. They will build comb and use up the honey which they arrive with.

When I put Colony 17 into their Commercial hive body I had too few full-sized frames. I increased the number by putting in shallow frames from a super. Yesterday I quickly opened the hive to replace the shallow frames with full-sized deep frames.

Summer Harvest

Submitted by will on Mon, 27/06/2016 - 21:48

We took some honey off our long established Hive (A) over the weekend. It amounted to 12Kg including extracted honey and comb. As always, it tastes fantastic. It's so strong that I can't eat very much.

I use National frames but mostly without foundation. There is evidence that chemicals leach from the wax in foundation and get transported around the hive (NB: I don't have a journal article reference for that claim, so treat with care please). I wanted to avoid that.