I had begun to worry about the quantity of food my bees were consuming and how much they had in store. I am unable to get a good sense of stores bees may have by hefting the hives, I do not trust myself to guess this accurately. Most of the colonies have consumed the additional 2.5kg of fondant that they were given over the Christmas period when I also treated them with oxalic acid.

It is a little early, however Sunday was a beautiful day, to remove woodpecker and mouse guards, change hive floors and swap brood and supers back round putting them either above a queen excluder or the crown board. All my hives had plenty of stores, in most cases 7 or 8 frames full and 1 or 2 frames of brood, the queens have just started to lay. I clearly had no need to worry about lack of food, they were all looking healthy and well. So far I have not had any losses this winter, it is of course a very critical time now as brood will continue to expand and the need for stores will increase.

In the past few weeks my colonies have been frantically making preparations to swarm. Most have had 2 or 3 good sized queen cells and numerous smaller ones in the hive at each weekly inspection. Being meticulous, making sure these are all removed along with even the smallest of queen cups is a slow but important task to make sure the bees do not have the opportunity to swarm. So far this is working to prevent swarming. However now we are having better weather and the bees are able to make use of the nectar flow I am thinking of changing the plan to control swarming.

Ideally I would like to keep a few colonies together using the the demaree method, after i successfully used it a few years ago, artificial swarm some into new boxes with foundation to replace old foundation when they are united again and try again to rear queens using my best colony to replace those that head up the colonies that need to be improved.

In addition the past few weeks weather has been more favourable and it looks like there may be the opportunity to take some supers off and extract some honey next week. 3 colonies now have 2 or more supers that are full and capped over, this seems crazy as only last week i was feeding 2 others. I need to be careful and make sure if I take honey off any split colonies are left with enough in the supers to provide food if required.

The distraction therapy appears to have worked, it feels as if in no time i am back in Goring with a few words to share with you after the sort drive home for the last part of my journey.

At one point in March with the short spell of warm weather, it looked as if it could be repeat of last year. With oil seed rape beginning to flower in March, supers at the ready, in fact 4 of my hives had supers that were being filled and i had expectations that swarming may begin by the first week in April.

Then it all changed, the wettest April in more than 100 years has put colonies at risk of starvation. My colonies all came through the winter looking strong and in late March food stores filling 2 or 3 frames in the brood box along with the honey in supers. I managed to visit and check stores later in April and begin feeding 3 colonies that had depleted these stores, but i was too late, the size of the brood nest had reduced dramatically in these colonies as a result of lack of forage, the result is so frustrating, the richest nectar flow we have in the year is sitting in the fields inaccessible due to cold and wet weather and has been for the last 4 weeks! I noticed today that this is now going over and i am sure will be gone in the week or two.

Still the bad weather has allowed time in doors to build hive stands and other equipment. Let’s hope the weather changes very soon.

My year has been completely focused on increase through queen rearing and so the slightest bit of swarming instinct that my bees have had has been channelled into this fruitful activity leaving all hives with new queens. Ordinarily i am sure by the time we get to mid September bees are not going to swarm. Feeding and varroa treatment are almost complete and only a few weeks to go before we baton down hatches for winter. Or so i thought.

At the apiary today the bees were really busy, with lots of pollen, i expect from ivy being bought into all 3 colonies on this site. In fact they were queuing up to get through the entrance blocks that are reduced to prevent wasps gaining entrance.

I also noticed some bees showing interest in the base of a small tree to the left of the hives. On closer inspection it appeared to be a swarm. I felt it necessary to find out which hive they would have come from and got lucky with the first hive, as it had far fewer bees than the last inspection. Curiosity settled but none the wiser as what to do, I had little equipment or anything that would help gather a swarm. Why now, why on earth have they decided to leave a hive filled with food with barely a few weeks before winter begins to set in, surely this bee suicide?

I returned later with a nuc hive to put the swarm in as i could only guess the bees must have left a new queen in the somewhat emptier hive and it would not be a good idea to try and put them back from where they have come from. The bees were not easy to collect, in fact they were impossible to collect from a tree with a trunk that can only be described as a bunch of large sticks, surround by chicken wire to keep out rabbits and it also being very windy. The few bees that were being brushed out of the tree as this was the only way of getting to them were just being blown away and flying immediately of the sheet to collect them. After about 15 minutes i had collected little more than a few handfuls each time placing them on a board to climb into the nuc. I am pretty sure i have not collected the queen and had to leave them, i guess i have 2 chances, the bees may decide that they would be better off in the original home, move into the nuc or look for something else?

Today i have split my queen rearing colony for the second and final time this season. The aim is to produce 4 large nucs from the double brood colony that will be strong enough to go through the winter. Over the past 2 weeks i have been repeating the process i undertook in May using a Cupkit and Cloake board. So far i must say with more success, as this time i have produced 7 out of a possible 10 queen cells, each quite large and beautifully drawn out on the cell bar. 3 frames of brood and 2 of honey/nectar along with a queen cell have been put in national hives placed on top of each other in two stacks on the same site as the original colony. Yesterday i removed the queen and placed her in a nuc box with the frame she was on and 2 other frames, filling the remaining space with 2 other fames.

In addition 2 of the remaining queen cells were placed in mating Apidea. I have not used these before and wanted to try them for queen rearing. Each was filled with fondant and a cup full of bees. I hope they will draw out some comb from the small starter strips placed on the tiny wooden frames. These have been left closed up in a shady spot on the apiary, i will open the door to let the bees fly on Friday. Finally the colony that was the swarn that set up home in the spare equipment has lost its queen already and so i placed the last queen cell in this colony after destroying a number of poor queen cells that had been drawn out.

The queens are due to hatch on Thursday and if the weather holds there are still plenty of drones about. It will be over the next few weeks that the last of the drone brood emerges and then begin to be evicted from hives by the workers to preserve fruits of the summers labour. Let’s hope the weather holds for successful mating.

The queen rearing has provided me with less colonies than i had hoped, however they are all doing well, the new colonies all have 5 or 6 frames of brood, with a really good laying pattern and plenty of stores. The strongest of these new colonies is in a double brood box with the bees already and up into the super.

Unusually i had not required any of these spare parts in the other hives, so after checking through the colonies i decided to see what all the fuss was about in the corner as the activity had not lessened.

I took off the two spare roof’s and for some reason felt the need for caution when lifting of the floor that was on top of an empty super. It felt heavy as i levered it up with the hive tool, to find a large cluster of bees clinging to the bottom of the floor. I had to grab my camera and think what to do.

I have never seen a swarm of bees before let alone handled one. I suppose this was not strictly a swarm. None the less, it was not a colony all neatly tucked up between 11 frames in a box 18 inches square.

My approach required little thought, put it in a brood box and hope for the best. Lifting of the floor, super and crown board below, i placed it on an upturned roof. This gave me access to the two brood boxes below that has drawn comb and some frames with foundation. In these boxes i also found the new residents had filed 3 frames with nectar and began to draw the foundation on the frames on the opposing sides. I lifted these frames into a single brood box and placed it onto another floor. Into this i shook the bees that were clinging to the underside of the other floor and then filled the brood box with frames. On top a queen excluder, super (to give them the enough space if they need it) and a crown board completed the bees new home. There were three pieces of freshly drawn comb stuck to the floor where the bees were clustered, this was full with nectar and pollen, i laid these on the crown board to allow the bees to clean these up and placed the other spare hive parts on top.

Hopefully they will settle in nicely to their re arranged home, after all it does have a great view and good neighbours.

Walking around the corner the bees were flying busily out of the hives, in fact i have never seen so much activity outside the hives with the bees flying in and out with purpose. Of the 6 colonies i could see that 3 had bees returning with pollen. The pollen was a mix of colours yellow, orange, reddish brown and black. I think the black pollen may be coming from the bright red poppies that are bringing colour back into the once golden fields of rape. These colonies should be have laying queens in them.

After going through each colony i discovered that 4 of the 6 had laying queens, i only saw 1 of the 4 queens with eggs and or brood in the other 3. Maybe my eye was not tuned into finding them, or was it because i wanted to get into each hive as quickly as possible, check they were queenright by finding eggs and moving onto the next. One of the colonies, No.5 turned out to be incredible, 9 frames were already laid with sealed brood and eggs. The laying pattern was also the best i have ever seen, nearly every cell is laid evenly except for the ‘W’ pattern where the wires run through the wax.

Ii decided to unit the 2 hives that were not queen right with 2 of the queenright colonies. To join them i placed newspaper with a few slits in it over the bottom brood box and placed the queenless brood box on top.

So overall i have 4 colonies with laying queens. I feel that this has been worth it even after not having as many colonies that i would have liked. Further thoughts have left me wondering if i should have continued to feed all the colonies after they were split? It so happens the 4 that have queens either had a super with stores or a feeder with syrup. I also wonder if i have been to hasty joining the colonies that appeared to be queenless, was this really the case or had the queen not begun laying?

The Cupkit had been placed in the top brood box so it did not take long to get in and have a look. Initially i was disappointed as there were only 2 queen cells from the 10 cups on the cell bar and a large amount of freshly drawn comb. Not a great result, i guess something went wrong, at the moment i can’t think what, still 2 perfect queen cells is better than none. On closer inspection looking through the brood boxes i found the colony had also drawn out a number of other very good size queen cells. I decided to use the best 3 of these as well to make up the new colonies. In fact there is a benefit to using these too as the mother of these is the queen that i originally wanted to use to rear queens. This way i have can have new colonies from two different queens

So i set about breaking down the colony into 5 new smaller colonies, each with a queen cell, 3 frames of brood of different ages and a frame of honey. Rather than taking the queen cells and rearing them in Apidea i wanted to use hives and set up smaller colonies in each one. I hope there is benefit in having 4 frame colonies rather than using smaller Apidea. I want tehm to quickly gain in size over the summer to be stronger going into winter. After all i want colonies and not just a large number of queens.

I should also have found the original queen, after 2 thorough searches i was unable to find her. There were some eggs in the colony so if she was no longer there she was there recently. If she is in one of the splits i guess anything could happen with the colony she is now in, the right result for me is that she will be replaced by the queen hatching from the queen cell.

As i am not using Apidea i have decided i would try a method i have found on the Dave Cushman website, this suggests that the new colonies should be placed in a circle 2-3m wide around the site of the original colony with all the entrances facing inwards. The website suggests that this should result in a fairly even distribution of flying bees across the 5 colonies.

I now have to play a waiting game to see the results. The queens will all be hatching later this week, the ones from the Cupkit will be hatching on Thursday and the others within a day or so. By this time next week they will be ready to fly.

I was left with only one option for getting a queen to lay in the Cupkit so as not to delay the process further, this was to place the queen from hive No.2 in the Cupkit and use her as the mother for my new queens. After had done this successfully a second time I put hive No.1 back together and hoped the queen had returned to the colony.

The next day eggs were laid in the Cupkit and the queen released back into hive No.2. Yesterday I pushed in the slide that separates the two brood boxes making the top colony queenless by sealing the queen in the bottom box. A new entrance at the rear of the bottom box has been opened to allow the bees to fly from the bottom box. Bees returning to the hive will return to the front of the hive and use the original entrance that allows access to to top brood box, increasing the concentration of bees in this box. This is important as today i placed the cells from the Cupkit with larvae less than 24hrs old into this top box. The now overcrowded and queenless bees in the top box also have only sealed brood so will hopefully make queen cells from the 10 larvae that have been added.

I also took the opportunity to look through the bottom brood box to see if the queen had returned to the hive after flying off unexpectedly. If at all I hoped i would find eggs but as luck would have it she was on the third frame I looked at together with freshly laid eggs. So far so good, we are still on track although the genes (mother) are different to what I had hoped.