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.