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When you get to 4000 hives you may need to find out

The OP says they have 30 hives so requeening then does become more of an undertaking. Useful point of the vertical split and late season recombine is that it uses less space and if the new queen is a failure you can just remove her before recombining. I think MM is now closer to 4000 than 1000?

The largest beefarmer in the UK , Murray McGregor more or less does what you are suggesting. He splits his colonies in two vertically around swarming time and then reunites them together when they go to the heather - the queens sort it out amongst themselves - most of the time the young queen...

Swienty Breeze is fantastic for working in hot weather - can wear t-shirt and shorts and stay relatively cool

Certainly if the weather is poor, but you suspect there is trouble on the way, you can often intervene and find them together just before the barometric pressure starts rising again

Typically bees will swarm just after the first QC is capped - i.e D9 for the Q from egg. On d16 VQ emerges so that was 4-5 days ago. It takes a week or so for her to even be ready to fly and then she will only venture our in very good weather. Even with mini-nucs I would not inspect for at...

When you say inspected do you mean pulling out frames? Bees don't like being consistently disturbed and can abscond.

As I say I find it a fairly bomb proof method- I would probably mix oregano with something that has softer leaves e.g. grass so they can enlarge the entrance more easily and also remember to bruise it to maximise the scent released

Despite what you have been told by others it is actually not too difficult to move hives 400m at this time of year. The key thing you need to achieve is for the bees to know that something has changed and they are in a different place - you do this by providing several triggers. The bees will...

Need four factors for a swarm, Queen, queen cells, excess foragers and under employed nurse bees. If you separate most of the foragers from the queen cells the remaining nurse bees will typically tear all but one down. Simplest solution would be to swap positions of hive brood chamber and...

Unless you migrate to the heather you are only likely to get a decent honey crop around here one year in four so mead may not be the way to go..

That is a good point - I now run my colonies foundationless in multi-storey nuc boxes. I very rarely get burr comb but had not made the connection until now!

Longer term Emma will hopefully benefit from being within the area populated by drones from my treatment-free colonies - all of which came through the winter unscathed and are building up nicely

The queen needs nurse bees to look after her and sometimes if she has not laid much overwinter there may not be enough around. I would take a frame from of mainly capped brood from one of your other colonies and add it in and then give them a light syrup feed. If the queen is a dud they may...

"Like a Demaree" was meant to include the possibility of using a split board with a rear entrance which may be easier if floors and lids are in short supply. Did not go into great detail because I knew others would - just wanted to alert the OP to the fact that they were very much not out of...

You will need to think about doing something like a Demaree with your extra kit. Once the bees have decided they are going to swarm they are likely to continue to even if you have provided more space. You will need to separate the queen from the majority of the young nurse bees and brood. If...

You could nadir the closed bottom brood boxes under the Maisemore double nucs - or is the bottom box closed in those too? I am increasingly moving over to just using the brood extenders with separate floors because of the greater flexibility it provides when making splits etc

I think sycamore are the first major source of nectar of the year for my bees. Never get to harvest any of the honey as it all gets consumed in the June gap.

I am going to give the BeeKing app a try out this spring - it allows voice entry of records and notes at the apiary with a web portal for creating apiary, colony, queen records on your laptop. https://beeking.eu/en/index.html

I think that is opening them and putting fondant on the top bars - adding fondant on top of the crown board hardly disturbs them at all.