Neils

So things chug along quite merrily. If I have a complaint about my bees it's that they love gumming things up. I've seen it noted that Hoffman frames attract Brace comb and mine is certainly no exception. Still, that aside things seem to be progressing nicely. The first super is being nicely drawn and starting to fill up. Possibly a little ahead of schedule I've added a second super and started to cycle drawn comb into the top box and foundation down below. We've got a huge stack of foundation frames at the moment but very little in the way of drawn comb. I've also taken a frame of stores and a drawn, but unused frame of comb out the brood box and replaced with frames of foundation in anticipation of trying to make up a Nuc and getting 3 from 1 when I do an AS soon (tm).

Otherwise, there isn't a great deal of change since last week, there's an extra side of brood, but that's about it and still no active drones. But I believe that next week I should start to see some.

Last week I ended up cutting the comb from my super frame, not because it was full of Drone brood but simply because they'd fixed it to the sides of the brood box and it made a right mess when I removed the frame to have a look what was going on. This week there's nice new Drone sized cells in place.

Having moved the hive in readiness to AS and placed the new 14x12 hive in place I headed up to the association apiary for the first meeting. Apparently I've resigned which was news to me but just seems to be a case of mistaken identity, I certainly didn't join the comittee just to throw a strop This time last year I came back a little despondant seeing the difference between my colony and the Association hives, this time I'm a little more cheery, mine is a lot stronger than all but one of the association colonies. Even if I can't claim to be active doing something right, I can at least feel that I'm not doing it wrong .