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Altogether a strange year for me so far..
I lost 2 colonies over the winter (absconded), and from the 19 that survived I kept 7, the rest I sold on or traded for wild boar.
Everything was looking great for a super spring crop and then April went cold and wet, with may bringing more of the same. no honey, lots of lost queens on their maiting flights, not much joy at all.
With far more TLC than should be needed I have got myself back up to 20 colonies, the Linde and clover is ...

Got another 24 cells into apideas tonight at the queen rearing group.
Someone turned up late with 3 charged apideas and there was only one cell left.
We have a few more apideas loaded and there are 18 more cells ready to go in tomorrow.

I hope we get some better weather for mating flights as this is a lot of work with an uncertain outcome.

I just checked 9 apideas I have at home.

One had absconded, one was missing a queen, 4 had eggs or larvae and 3 still had a queen but no eggs yet.
Just got finished checking in the nick of time as we have torrential rain again.

3 weeks later than last year but bodes well for the 50+ apideas in the queen rearing group which are just over a mile away from these ones. This batch of queens mostly emerged 3 weeks ago.

Edit.
Checked another 9 ...

Towards the end of May I found a couple of recently started queen cells in one of the colonies at the association apiary.
Our group was meeting the following evening so I used the opportunity to demonstrate an artificial swarm.
I removed the queen and most of the brood to a 7 frame nuc box and after removing several queen cells, I inserted a grafted cell due to hatch the next day. I checked this 2 days later and the queen had emerged.
So far so good.
For one reason or ...

I checked one of my cell raiser colonies this afternoon and 7out of 8 cells had been pulled down at the side. These were not due to hatch until next Monday so the virgin had not emerged from one of the grafted cells.

I started checking the frames and there was a pollen frame with just a small patch of about 20 cells of brood and they had made a sneaky queen cell from one of these which had a perfect circular exit hole.

Bad enough to lose 7 cells but I now had to find ...