In contrast to our recent weather Saturday was a really lovely day: warm, sunny, very few clouds. Proper shorts weather. So I did 🙂
Given the fact that it was so pleasant, first order of the day was to inspect the colonies in my home apiary. Nothing much too exciting to report there: one colony probably needs a super and another (one of the ones I moved from another apiary) looks as though it is intending to supersede the queen. I went through the frames twice and could only find a single queen cell down one edge of one frame so I’m going to assume it’s supersedure and I’ll leave them to it. They may swarm once the queen cell is capped, but there aren’t any scouts sniffing around my bait hive at the moment, so I hope not. If they do, with a bit of luck the bait hive will catch them.
After lunch I inspected the only hive at another apiary. They seemed to be building quite slowly last month, but in the two weeks since our last inspection (it was too cold and wet to do last Saturday) they’ve really taken off. We have them another brood box so there’s room to expand.
And finally I did some inspections at a local farm. A colony there was a swarm from last year that seemed to have done really well last year, but was now building very slowly. They were still in a brood box that I used for last year’s bait hives because I’d not had time to switch them when I caught Covid last Summer, so I’ve now put them in a “long term” brood box.
Some time this week I need to get some bait hives out. I suspect that if our weather improves as the Met Office says it will, there are going to be quite a few swarms about soon.