Neils

Well I might get a pot or two of honey yet.

The Swarm is expanding nicely having generously given up two frames of brood to help the other two colonies out and is now starting to fill up a super nicely. It's now covering 6 frames of brood and drawing out the foundationless frames nicely.

The queenright colony in the nuc seems to have given up trying to supersede her and they're now nicely covering 3 frames of brood and look to be about a few days away from starting to expand again in earnest. They're a little low on food so I might give them half a litre or syrup or so to keep them ticking over if the weather doesn't improve over the next few days.

The other colony is still apparently queenless though I think there should be a (hopefully) mated queen in there. The cells are now looking like they're being polished up and it's only just been two weeks since the queen emerged so I'm not panicking just yet. If there's still nothing next week then it might be time to think about combining what's left with the Nuc.

Up at the nature reserve they're coming along nicely and the brambles are now starting to flower. They've got plenty of supers, far more in fact than they actually need at the moment but with 8 frames of brood now present they're also a few days away from really starting to go nuts. They've calmed down a bit, but I'm still glad they're down on the nature reserve and not on the allotment. They follow, put a lot of bees in the air during the inspection and applying Roger Patterson's 50-50 rule, they're definitely in the 50% that I'd look to requeen. They're also showing a few bees with Deformed Wings so I'll be keeping a close eye on the varroa levels over the next couple of weeks.