News about our beehives, inspections and what we have found.
I headed out to work on the Remuera swarm again, hopefully third time lucky. I spoke to Peter from the Franklin bee-club who suggested we take some old comb to attract them. Which I had done last time, but this time I also took a frame of capped honey from our stores. What I did […]
In between collecting swarms we checked on our new hives today and treated them with “Api Life Var” the organic mite treatment, the mites counts have been low but we have been told that treating a hive with low brood is more effective. So lets see what happens. So in summary this is what we […]
Second visit to this Remuera hive, we texted the house owner “Nick” this morning and he advised us that the bees had returned to the hedge despite our efforts last night. The bees are clustered in a middle of hedge and a wire fence to boot, so it’s not a simple group of ladies to […]
Got another call from a kind member of the public “Terry” yesterday morning while we were getting reading to tackle the Hawthorn Swarm again. A swarm had arrived yesterday and was in a tree. It turned out that Terry knows Tom Dixon from the Bee Club, so small world indeed. Luckily for us the swarm […]
Well a busy night moving bees around West Auckland. We picked up our swarm lure, which was overflowing with a swarm :). We wanted to move this colony within our own property, but as this was less than 2 miles away, we employed the 2 feet or 2 mile rule (Even if New Zealand uses […]
Yahoo we have a new hive of beautiful bees from our good friend Rocky. He had a swarm from one of his hives, a few weeks back and he managed to put them into a new box. He offered us the resulting colony, which was very generous of him. Rocky has learnt a lot in […]
Sad news today the weak hive “Mokoroa” has succumb to varroa mites. We used “Api Life Var” on the hive, but I suspect we treated too late to save them. We inspected them over the weekend and found the queen and dozens of other bees dead on the landing board. So now our bee garden […]
Well today was the day to treat the bees, my package from BeeGreen arrived today. I have placed a wafer in the top of Mokoroa. You break up the wafer into two pieces, but the way I opened up the package it became four pieces 🙂 I closed off the Screened bottom to help the […]
Well it’s that time of year when all bee keepers hope we have done enough to help our bees with the coming winter months in New Zealand. In the case of the Waitakere’s we seem to get excessive rain for weeks at a time. We now know the reason why the council built a water […]
Honey 1 Sugar Shake Today was the day to do the final sugar shake of Honey 1. We purchased a coffee grinder from the local hardware store. This helped us produce our own icing sugar without the cornflour that is usually included in icing sugar. We did the sugar shake with the ground sugar, and […]
