Saturday was forecast to be the finest day of the weekend, so I had planned my apiary inspection for this morning. As soon as the temperature had risen, and the bees were flying, I donned my bee suit and wandered up to the hives.*
I first checked on the colonies that had been created from artificial swarms taken from hives #1, #2 and #3. These are now numbered hives #6, #4 and #5 respectively. All three are building up quite nicely and hive #6 was moved from a nucleus box to a full sized National Brood box. All of the queens were visible and they are laying beautifully.
I had planned to get one of these colonies to start drawing foundation on some shallow frames in a super, but none of them were sufficiently developed for this. Perhaps they'll be ready in a week or two. I should also mention that colonies #4 and #5 don't seem to have the nicest of dispositions. The queen in #5 always produced workers that were a little stroppy, but the queen in #4 produced far better behaved workers ... perhaps it is related to the weather or their forage?
I then went on to work my way through hives #2 and #3. This was their first inspection since they had been split in early April, and I was hoping to see signs that they had produced mated queens. I could see cells that had clearly produced queens in both of the hives, but, as yet, there were neither eggs nor brood to be seen. I'll give it another week or two before I start to worry.
The colony inspection took most of the morning, and my afternoon was taken up with a once-yearly activity ... It was time to drag the rotamatiser from the shed.
I have written about this little rotorvator before and, also, about the fact that it is quite a work-out to rotorvate our veg patch. I'll try to avoid repeating myself, and simply say that I was exhausted by the time I had finished, and my eyelids were drooping by ten o'clock this evening.
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* I had spent the preceding hour levelling the ground and laying a heavy concrete slab as a base for hive #6.
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