I seem to recall reading from many sources that bees will stand any amount of cold, but what they can't take is prolonged damp and wind - ie wind chill. Okay, so last winter was the coldest in living memory here in Oronsay, and there were rakes of bee corpses to clear from time to time from the hive floor or entrance; this winter it was the windiest and wettest in living memory ... and scarcely any losses (and most of them seem to have drowned in soggy candy where it got too damp). Just when you think you've got it sussed ... the bees just prove how little we really know for sure.

Despite the strong sunshine and very light breezes, the air has been cold - too cold to pull out more than the empty outer frames to guage how much stores are left. But I hope to be more systematic in the next fortnight, perhaps this weekend, and I'll probably take the opportunity to swap brood chambers, floors etc with those I overhauled during the winter. There's not much 'wild' pollen here in March or early April (and Orasay does not 'do' flower gardens!) so I may feed Nektapoll if it looks like conditions will be good when any brood raised with will hatch.

I'm assuming I'm still in the position of having one action-ready queen and two others who just go through the motions. If conditions are right I may get to find out whether the two queens mated late last summer are infertile or whether up to now they just weren't in the mood. But the fact remains I need new blood in my apiary, and the search is back on in earnest for good clean Amm Queens (nucs better) for this Amm paradise (that's what it says in the immigration service's campaign literature anyway).