White Eyed Drone

Thanks @Dane Attwood for the comments,, much appreciated. Especially the reader that I’ll need to leave enough honey on for 2 brood boxes vs my usual one. I’m mindful of the Tutin test requirement thx, I get all honey tested through the bee club each year. Is it your experience that over supering vs under supering is best?, or is it a loads of different opinions area? My thoughts were that it’s a shorter distant for foragers from the entrance, and closer should the bees want to move some up from the brood boxes.

Thanks @M4tt. My only thought re splitting was so they didn’t swarm (and its fun to create new queens). I have enough hives so wont split. Look8mg forward to having a solid strong hive going into winter. cheers

I'd really appreciate advice from learned beekeepers please... I have three questions (which I'll explain): 1) As the 2 Full Deep boxes are almost full, should I be looking to split the hive? 2) If so, Can I use 2 queen excluders to locate the queen?. 2) Should I extract or leave a specific frame? Any other thoughts much appreciated... Background: This is my third bee keeping season, I started with a weak nuc April 17, and through walk away splits, I now have 3 strong hives one with two brood boxes, the other two are singles.

Yes @Beefriendly, looking forward to the detective work. Learning is one of the best things about beekeeping, and life...

Yeah thanks M4tt, just saw that in another post. Feeder frame in, will hold off on adding syrup.

Thx, @yesbut, this seems to be around 3FD, so therefore not impossible to be from my non marked queen hive. I’ll be keen to see for sure over the coming weeks if was from mine or other hives. Collecting experience!

I’m also thinking from the same hive, I thought I’d open up both nucs to put feeders in ahead of moving to new locations tonight. No bees in one of them, so I’m guessing that being in two very close locations on the tree was just dopue to space. If we’re on the branch with the queen would be too heavy? this being the first swarm that I’ve seen, I have no real judgement yet for the size of a swarm, so whether large, small etc. good fun though (even if catching my own)...

I found 2 swarms today in my apiary, about 1 m apart, one larger than the other, both low down and on easy to cut branches. I put them into seperate Nuc's. The larger one had an unmarked queen which I caught and transfered to the nuc box before shaking in the bees. I'm not sure whether the second swarm had a queen. A few hours on, both seem happy in the nuc boxes. My first swarm captures ? Swarms top left (ball), bottom right (along branch). Q1) Would the swarms likely be from the same hive, or separate?. Q2) is it likely that t

That’s the great thing about bee keeping right?, the same situation in different years / locations / seasons has the potential to play out very differently. The “no substitute for experience” part of bee keeping is one of the best things - we never stop learning!

Thanks for the advice all. Plenty of things for me to consider for next time. Cheers

Thanks all for the comments / thoughts. M4tt - I didn’t realise that bees would move eggs, so much to learn!.

Trev - after 70 views, you are the first to reply, and I bet it’s appreciated. Thanks for contributing here for us new beeks, and for the videos. Very generous of you to be sharing your knowledge. Cheers

A week ago I created a split in my queen castle using 2 frames of eggs, brood of all stages and stores. I didn’t want to risk the brood getting cold / not covered, so I added a frame of nurse bees from a different hive. At the time they seemed to get on ok. A week later, half have died, and the other are very weak. I’m thinking they could have fought, tried to steal the reserves etc. any thoughts?

I've just found a capped queen cell in the underside (recess) of the Ecrotek top feeder on a hive that I split last Autumn. I've had the bees build comb into the underside of the feeder before, but not lay in it. At the start of spring, the hive was growing fast and using up a lot of the winter stores so I put the top feeder on to help build stores ahead of the flow. The bees stored the syrup and last week when I was planning to take the top feeder off I noticed a lot of comb on the underside (in the recess) and larvae, and couldn't find the Queen in the brood box. Not wan

Same here, the kids (and I) look forward to seeing “snow” on the trees making for a white Christmas. Then soon after the petals shed and mess up my pool. First world problem.