Sailabee

There has been manuka in flower pretty much continuously for the last three months on SH 1 between Albany and Silverdale, and elsewhere. Useless to bees because of the ambient temperature. Elsewere in Auck, still coming into flower. It is an area of many and varied micro-climates.

Or ring Asure Quality and ask if it is a registered apiary - if it is, like Markypoo's hives, an AP 2 will have already inspected it.

Facility no longer available to anyone other than the company that owns it as they have enough of their own stuff to go through - it is at full capacity.

I am a fan of Arataki going back to the old school cardboard pot for honey - will be interesting to see if the market can get over itself and buy something that is not in a transparent container. One of the few things that Fonterra got totally right was sticking with the old paper wrapper on butter, and didn't compete with the plastic containers that cruddy margarine comes is.

I suggest you use the dimensions on pages 28 to 31 in the book 'Practical Beekeeping in New Zealand. I made my first boxes over ten years ago out of Douglas fir, and used those measurements, and well painted, they are all still going strong. Ply will start to delaminate within very few years. It simply isn't true that people with very little experience in beekeeping can read some overseas stuff and improve on the knowledge of those with decades of experience and close observation to draw on, and earn their living beekeeping.

Thank you, another new word. Imagine that causing a considerable collection of messy people - the type I have really only seen at the end of a long yacht race, with a raft of boats, and no-one driving home afterwards, but that was always dark rum.

Pyres like that with beeswax would however take many of us back to the draconian days of real beeswax candles in all powerful churches run by the morally bankrupt and perverted. Would take a far bit of whiskey to wash that memory away, never mind grieving for the departed!

I forgot the figure quoted - senior moment - was either 40% or 60% - which is a fair wack.

Found it educational that in last nights news, Jacinda said that sales of honey to Japan have risen hugely since the signing of the TTPA, so someone is not telling the truth - perhaps those same people are buying very cheap honey while saying the international market if falling.

Exactly @frazzledfozzle, why would someone pay stupid money for a queen on Trademe, buying from someone with half a dozen hives calling themselves a queen breeder? I remember a top ayrshire breeder and judge saying that from a herd of 200 cows, no matter how good they are, there should not be more than 10 cows max that you should keep a bull from if you wish to maintain the standard, or better still improve it, and that does not take into account that many of that ten will have heifers.

Yep, photo took a good thirty years off.

I think you are absolutely right @BSB, and I would venture to suggest that those selling anything that lays have contributed in no small way to the lower average crop/hive - not the only cause, but definitely a contributor. If you are selling a dairy bull, the production figures of the cow he is from are provided. It never ceases to amaze me that people who are trying to make a living, admittedly in their first year or so of beekeeping, and as a commercial from the getgo pay a kings ranson for hundreds, if not thousands of nucs with anything that looks like a queen in them, laying a few eggs. Many of these so-called queen breeders, when asked about of the temperament of the bees will proudly tell you how agro they are, which they read as a positive characteristic, as if nice bees are inferior.

One thing we hobby beeks need to understand is that if there was a brilliant blend of essential oils, or anything else that actually works, the first to give it a go are the commercials for whom it is there living. I bet that overall there is nothing published online that no one here has found and read.

I think the core of your problem is captured in the phrase 'horrid chemical strips'. They are your hives best chance of survival, plus change whatever it was that caused the small size of the hives in the first place. Adding a cocktail of unproven essential oils will not overcame those problems.

Possibly not queenless, so much as the queen was on a pre-swarm diet and had stopped laying.