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I found a few open queen cells in two colonies today and did an artificial swarm in each case, leaving the queen with the flyers on the original site and moving the brood away.
I am very surprised it has taken them until 23rd June.
They were not even my strongest colonies, which are all on double brood, and I am going to take a long cold look at the advantages and disadvantages of this irrespective of the doctrine that AMM are happy enough in a single brood box. I have three colonies ...

• - Shake the bees from a central frame in the super onto plastic sheeting
• - Fill approx 30g bees (that is about 300) into a labelled container
• - After killing the bees by freezing them weigh the sample of bees
• - Let the bees soak for at least 15 minutes in soapy water (use washing up liquid) and shake thoroughly.
• - Separate the varroa from the bees buy rinsing through a double sieve. Or use a course metal mesh (too catch the bees) over a coffee filter paper
• - count the varroa / 10g

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This last couple of weeks have been hectic and
We have hatched 35 queens from grafted larvae from my best two colonies.

I have 9 in nucs with about 3 frames of bees and another 8 which hatched on Monday in Apideas. TT has the rest of them in various nucs and mini nucs.

I have set up two queenright cell raising colonies made up of a bottom brood box with the queen and lots of egg laying space, followed by an excluder, three supers and then another brood box on ...

More of an observation I guess than anything else. My colleagues bees arrived over the weekend. Bright yellow things, I thought mine were pretty calm, these are so laid back they're almost asleep!

Having hived them in 14x12s on standard national frames they've naturally gone and made a right mess of everything so we took a potter up to tidy up the bottom of the frames, mark a queen and give them a once over. With that done I decided I might as well check out the Nuc I hived last ...

Knew I'd forgotten something.

At the beginning of the year I spotted a request from a nature reserve just down the road from my parents who wanted bees on the land. Despite my parents having been there for nearly 20 years, none of us had any idea this reserve was just around the corner.

Back in february I went along to one of their work parties, met everyone and we found a site suitable for a few hives. Then in March we prepared the area, located away from the main ...