Honey.ie A site by beekeepers dedicated to the production of Honey

Apidea maiting hives
Apidea maiting hives

The Apidea is regarded by some as the best mini nucleus mating hive. It is used to mate virgin queens with a minimum amount of bees A frame from the Apidea mini nucleus mating hive. The Apidea mini nucleus mating hive only uses a small amount of bees. We use these to breed our queens. […]

Swarm
Swarm

We had a swarm today, have a look at the images. what is a swarm? Swarming is the natural means of reproduction of honey bee colonies. A new honey bee colony is formed when the queen bee leaves the colony with a large group of worker bees, a process called swarming.

Honey flow is on the way
Honey flow is on the way

The honey is comming, and the plants are supplying some of them are pictured below Some oil seed rape in Ballynoe Some grass seeds in ballynoe

Jarring the honey
Jarring the honey

Well the last of last years crop of honey is gone, we used our new jarring machine. While the traditional simple way of jarring is opening and closing a valve. Our new machine makes life a little easer using a gear pump to give an exact measurement of honey. The machine itself came all the […]

More qeen rearing
More qeen rearing

The results of the queen rearing are bearing fruit, we had our first queen today above is the queen cells from grafted lava. A close up of the queen cell Placing the queen cell into the holder The queen cells ready for putting in to the incubator above the queen cells in the incubator keep […]

Queen rearing
Queen rearing

Its the season for queen rearing, we’ve been using a number of methods to do queen rearing the main one was grafting. we took the queen out of the hive, and put in the cell bar in with the grafts long side a frame of pollen and a frame of young bees. Then we added […]

Checking the hives
Checking the hives

Hives were opened on the 23rd of April, Images can be seen below Above you can see the Bees ariving win with Pollen   looking for larvae, that is young Bees