Those of you who read this blog and who keep bees will no doubt have heard of the name Brother Adam. In short Brother Adam was a monk of Buckfast Abbey who spent his entire life devoted to beekeeping and bee breeding. He developed the Buckfast bee and was a hugely influential figure in beekeeping …
Tag: queen rearing
Queen Rearing – the Cook method part 4
Last Wednesday we carried out the last stage of the process – dividing the sealed queen cells up amongst mating nucs. We didn’t get as many pictures this time as everything got a bit hectic whilst we were filling the nucs and all hands were needed. First we got all the mininucs ready for filling …
Queen rearing – the Cook method part 3
Today and yesterday saw the critical parts of our queen rearing procedure taking place. Or to my mind the scariest parts. For the morning session we had myself, Tony, John, Dianna and Ian in attendance. The plan was to rearrange the colony to make the bottom brood box (full of young bees after last week’s …
Queen rearing – the Cook method part 2
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that we were about to embark at long last on a foray into rearing our own queens. Unfortunately the superb weather of April has been replaced by a somewhat more familiar icy blast and we had to delay our plans. However this week it was decided that if …
Queen Rearing – The Cook Method
We’ve been planning to embark on a queen rearing programme here at MBA for some time now and this weekend, at last, we’re going to start in earnest! The method we are going to use is good for small scale queen rearing but can be adapted for greater numbers. It’s called the Cook Method and …
