C. La Chassagne

Hello everyone,

We made some windows in our latest hive. This is very rewarding as it makes it possible to take a look into your hive every day, without opening the hive.

here's the short video about that:



(English subtitles in youtube)

Enjoy!

I think this new hive design is very interesting. At the same time, this here makes a lot of sense:

Michael Cox wrote:It is much better to let nature [natural selection] take its course and breed from the bees that survive varroa, rather than prop up weak colonies.

Hello everyone,

After our adventures with the swarming of our first colony, we now acquired a new colony from a beekeeper friend in the neighborhood. Here's a short video about that:


(English subtitles in youtube)

Enjoy!

Thanks, David. Yes, this is from our first hive, the one with the flowframes. We now took the super off, though, as they first have to increase in numbers again and had not yet starting using the flowhives.

Did the swarms you captured go into your bait hive without your intervention?

Hello everybody,

Our recently acquire first bee colony has swarmed. Here is a short video on how that adventure ended:



Don't feed a recently swarmed colony!

Cheers!

David Livingston wrote:Dadant is common through out France so I am told

That's what I thought.

Thanks for the offer of sending me the link! I've got an extra dadant ready (this one we bought), but it can't hurt to look at other designs.
We bought the other dadant to be prepared should swarming of our current hive take place.

I'm wondering, though, if it would be worth a try to -like you- just put our second one out there and see if it would attract any other swarms. I've got all the frames with wax foundation to fit out both the brood box and the super with frames. Or is there a risk of the wax going bad or being eaten (or otherwise used) by other small animals or organisms? (Also, I've got to say, I've never seen a swarm here, even though [or maybe because?] there are several other beekeepers in the area).

I put the super on top on advice of the beekeeper who sold me the colony. To give them room to prevent swarming. Being new at beekeeping, we took the advice, but I see your point as well.

We indeed made the hive from Dadant plans. The brood box is exactly as a Dadant, but we had to modify the plans for the super to be able to accommodate the flow frames.

We went with Dadant because in our region, that seems to be the hive that is used by most beekeepers and at our local bee cooperation, we can get supplies for only Dadant.

Which design is most used in your region?

Hello David,

I think they have not started working on the flow frames because when we got the colony (about a week before we did this first spring inspection), it came on 6 frames. At least one of them still had room for them to work on. And we added two new frames with only wax foundation. As you can see in the video, they started to work on those as well, but they are not finished, yet.

In other words, they've still got plenty of room in the brood box to work, before (hopefully) expanding to the super.

I'm not sure that they are indeed preparing to swarm. The couple of queen cups that we saw might very well be so called "play cups". I did not have the chance to check the hive anew, given that the weather has been a bit on the cold side, this last week. So, I do not know if the queen/play cups have been expanding into queen cells. I'm looking forward do do another inspection, though!

Hello everyone,

We recently acquired our first bee colony which we have transferred into our home-made hive in France (video on that in an earlier topic). We did our first spring inspection and made a video of it.

Voice-over is in Dutch, but I've added English subtitles to it in youtube (just use the "cc"-button if necessary):



Enjoy!

Thanks for the reply and the suggestion, Cj Sloane!

I did check and correct it with a level before placing the hive. It is indeed a case of optical illusion, because it is a sloping terrain.

Cheers!