Boom time

This afternoon was my third inspection of the season on a beautifully warm sunny afternoon.  My strong colony was upgraded to a double brood box last week as it was rapidly running out of space.  I moved three brood frames (with the queen as it happened) up to the centre of the new box and left five in the centre below.  In the week the bees have fully drawn out half a dozen new frames and the queen has been busy laying.  The top box now has seven frames of brood, including four which are nearly completely laid with eggs.  The bees have gone from foundation to this in a week.

Elsewhere they are still hard at work making comb.  This shows how they build on a foundationless frame.  You can see some of them don't have far to travel for forage.

The other colony was downsized to a nuc two weeks ago and is still small although it seems happy.  I wondered about giving it a frame of eggs from the neighbouring hive but I wasn't sure there were enough nurse bees to cope.  It is something the think about in the next week or two.  Let's hope this lovely weather continues.

First inspection

My bees have had six months of peace and quiet but the weather was so good today I decided to take a quick look to see how they have been getting on over the winter.  I could tell quite a lot from watching the hives over the last few weeks.  Hive 2 has been very active with lots of bees coming and going in all weathers and lots of pollen being taken in.  Hive 1 was quieter and hive 3 often showed very little activity - the bees seemed to come out only when it was very sunny.

Hive 1 was my best hive over the past couple of years.  The queen laid well - up to 14 frames of brood - and they never showed any signs of swarming.  At the last inspection last year I found two unmarked queens, presumably in the process of superseding.   The lighter coloured of the two may have been the resident two-year-old queen with her yellow paint missing so I marked both green.  Today I found a small colony led by the darker queen.  There was brood in all stages but on only two sides of part of one frame.  This is one of my foundationless frames.

Hive 2 started last summer with a queen cell from the next door hive and was doing well at last inspection last year.  Today they are thriving with seven frames of brood, including lots of eggs.

Interestingly there is already sealed drone brood where the queen has laid in drone comb on the foundationless frames.

Hive 3 had a new queen last July and she seemed to be doing well although I made a comment in the records that she wasn't so big.  Things were OK until the last inspection in late September when I found a new small unmarked queen and no eggs.  I assumed the colony had superseded but too late in the season as there would have been no drones around.  I left the queen unmarked.

When I looked in today there was a small colony with only two seams of bees.

The unmarked queen was still present.

There was only a small amount of brood and it was all drone brood.

I marked the queen although she is easy to spot in a small colony.  I wondered about removing her and adding a frame of eggs from hive 2 but I think it is too early in the season because if the hive raised a new queen from a queen cell there would be no drones to mate with.  I could unite them with hive 2 or just let them fizzle out. Either way this colony has no future.

So it was an interesting start to my beekeeping season.  I'll have to keep an eye on hive 2 which is booming and will soon need more room.  And I wonder about downsizing hive 1 to a nuc for a few weeks.  In the current restrictions everything else I do is cancelled so it was a great pleasure to spend time with the bees.