Smoker bellows are also a good place for stings to reside from the previous inspection - something I saw once.
May your bees read the same books as you do.
Yes, often a new queen will calm the bees down after a couple of weeks. Sometimes though, it takes 2 months for the genetics of the previous queen's bees to go. VERY occasionally, bees are better when queenless after the former queen is removed. I've seen it a couple of times, the last time was when the queen was not performing well, so maybe the bees sensed something was wrong but she kept destroying supercedure cells as they were produced so they couldn't get rid of her.NigelP wrote: ↑10 Jun 2020, 11:28
I've noticed that hive temperament is a bit of Ying and Yang. Sometimes the queen influences it strongly and sometimes it's the genetics of the worker bees. As queens mate with several drones you only need one "bad" drone and you get an approx 10% aggressive workforce. Bit simplified explanation but near enough.
I bet that's happened more times that people would want to admit!
I am 100% with Nigel on this sting pheromone on leather gloves. I do use them but if I get a sting (rare but certainly felt through even posh goatskin gloves ) I immediately rub peppermint oil on the spot and I wash the gloves in warm soapy water - doesn't seem to do any harm to the gloves.
Round here that means something completely different
I decided to start off our beginners course with a series of photographs showing happy beekeepers around the world handling frames of bees with no gloves and their veil back (I did carefully explain it they were portraits and thus to be treated with caution).
Buckfast lines (there are several) are pretty stable hybrids. Brother Adam spent a lot of time ensuring the traits he introduced into them bred true.AdamD wrote: ↑12 Jun 2020, 20:21I can't recall seeing this question asked;
So, if Buckfasts are hybrids, And if I had an island 20 miles from anywhere and only had Buckfasts on it, what would the resultant bees bee like 2, 3 or 4 generations down the line? (And would that be the same for, say a pure bred Carniolan which isn't a hybrid which I assume would breed 'true' but could become inbred if there was not enough genetic diversity?).