Congrats on the sale of splits Jeff, You must have been really busy with so many hives to do, but it must be done. I can’t figure out people who simply allow swarming when with a little forward planning it can be managed.
Good showers over night up here and more to come over the next 2 days, that will boost the Wattle along with their shallow root systems.
Busy making more wood-ware and painting to make up more hives for my apiary.
I have a days work for you marking my queens, I simply can’t see them easily, it is a fluke for me to see her with my parallax vision.
Regards mate
A week till spring officially starts and your already planning second splits! Geez! Is this shaping up to possibly be your biggest ever year on record Jeff?
Thanks Jack, I’m sure this is the best start of a spring in the 30 years I’ve been keeping bees. The difference between this year & last year is like chalk & cheese.
There may have been other years as good over the years, however I might have been concentrating more on fishing to notice them. I never used to let anything stand in the way when the weather was right to get a fishing trip in.
Hi @Peter48, we missed out on that rain, only enough to wet the road. Maybe we’ll get some tomorrow.
Have you got something to mark the queens? I’ve never done it before. Down the track after you get a few more produced & I can see a bit of light at the end of the tunnel.
I got rain again over night, it fell like the proverbial cats and dogs for an hour then eased to add worth while rain. Still heavy clouds at 7:30am.
I have all that is needed to mark the queen, just need to sight them. I did my last split last Friday so any time after the queen has been mated and laying will be good for me. I now have eight hives in the apiary and one off site. Once the queens are marked I will be able to do more efficient splits,
No worries mate, we got some nice rain I think. I’m making bread today. I made a poolish last night with water from my little rainwater tank that barely had a trickle. This morning I finished the dough with more rainwater, which had a much stronger flow.
I hadn’t emptied my rain gauge since last lot of rain, so I don’t know how much we got.
Yesterday morning my plans were to only make bread today. Now I have 8 boxes of honey to extract, before making the slow rise bread (actually little baguettes) later this afternoon. I’d better get started, cheers