New Bees!

This year we wanted more bees. During some freak stormy weather in the last week of June ours went mad and swarmed before we could split them! So we were left with a colony waiting for their queen to emerge and mate (and we are still waiting for her to lay!!!)

We were offered a huge prime swarm- this means the first swarm from a hive that season when the already mated queen leaves, unfortunately they wouldn't stay in their nuc and flew off on their own adventure! A few weeks later we were offered 2 swarms from someone on swarm collection duties in the association and we snapped them up! Jen works on 14x12 frames so we had to buy converter ekes for our standard nationals and more frames but then we were up and running. We've had them for two weeks now and they seem to be doing well.

The Hives

The green hive is thriving and the queen is laying well, I added a super for honey this week as they seem very busy and I want to give them the opportunity to expand. There seems to have been no June gap this year so there's no sort supply of nectar- must be the heatwave!

The Queen of the Green Hive, she has been marked hence the red dot on her back

The blue hive is doing well, it's not built up as quickly as the other but its still good and strong. I also saw bee eggs in this hive! Technically if you have a laying queen they are always there throughout spring and summer but I've always struggled to see them!

You can see the eggs in the bottom of the cells, they are like teeny tiny grains of rice

Our own hive is still waiting for the queen to start laying, I think she's mated but just not laying yet, I saw her checking out the size of cells during my inspection yesterday so fingers crossed she'll be laying very very soon! There's quite a bit of honey on this hive so maybe next week we'll do a honey harvest.

Our hopefully mated queen checking out the cell sizes