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Checked the two garden hives for the last time this year, took off the Apivar and dummied one down to 8 frames over 8 (the other one was already). Planning to finish off all winter preps for the allotment hives tomorrow.

Would have congratulated you in person but unfortunately I'm not in the Farnborough office tomorrow. Hope your stall in the Café does well!

Cleared 20 supers from 5 hives and extracted them all at the weekend. About 240kg. Fortunately our BKA (Twickenham) has a dedicated honey room with a 12 frame spinner. The harvest was saved by a great 3 weeks from the second week of June.

Found a new queen that I thought would emerge about 5/7 had laid up 4 frames already. Comes from a swarmy but gentle local mongrel line and will keep her out of sentimentality and as a change from the other Buckfast hives. Another hive had QCs only about 5 weeks after I had nuc’d the queen and...

Lime and bramble coming to an end here in West London. Plenty of Knapweed on the Ealing Common ‘wild flower’ area and also clover where it hasn’t been mowed recently. Weather looking grim though.

Quick check on some hives yesterday. One of the garden hives has filled a super a week for the last two weeks so had to quickly put together another super and 12 frames for them. Don’t think this will get drawn and filled in a rush though with the current weather and lime and bramble coming to...

Got a decent size patch of Rosebay Willowherb by our allotment plot which is just starting to flower. Trying to manage it and so it doesn’t start spreading everywhere.

Reduced to one queen cell in a hive we did swarm control on last week. Put another super on 4 hives as they have pretty much filled the ones we put on laat week. Looks like we are going to have a half decent harvest after all.

The biggest hive in the garden was doing that last night and is carrying it through into today. They are requeening (prob not relevant) and it got up to 30 degrees yesterday (more likely to be a factor). And was it just house bees doing it as into the morning the foragers should have been out...

Had to do swarm control for the second time this season on the same queen even though they had plenty of space. Nasty hive still rather nasty after requeening 5 weeks ago. Going to take a few more weeks for them to turn into gentle bees although being on triple brood and 5 supers, they are our...

Massive improvement since yesterday, The wind has dropped this morning and the forecast looks good. All hives very busy, hopefully on the lime.

Noticed that the bees in the big hive in the garden were acting suspiciously on the landing board at 9am and then realised they hadn't been inspected for 8 days. Normally don't get bees gathering in numbers on the landing board at 9am on a chilly morning. Went in and found one sealed QC and a...

Thanks for the advice @ericbeaumont

Thanks Eric! A new one to try, next year hopefully. If you have double brood and a super or two at the time would you put the super(s) above the new box and then the split board and then the double brood on top? Given there's a flow, are there problems with them drawing the foundation as the...

Eric - How do you do that and have the queenless part at the top?

Expanded a single brood box hive to double brood but with 16 dummied down frames. Requeened them a few weeks ago and she needs the space although the weather this week is not going to good for colony expansion given their stores situation was a little light.

I'm just down the road from you and had two hives out of five making swarm preps about 5 weeks ago. Two others were slow to build up and so am keeping a very close eye on the them now (re-queened one and so hopefully that will help). The 5th is a monster hive but the demaree and re-queening...

Shook out a laying worker hive that had failed to requeen after swarm control. The other two hives at the allotment site have a good amount of bees but not much in the way of stores whereas the two very big hives we have in gardens have filled one and two supers respectively. Only about half...

Just popped down to Ealing Common and a couple of trees I saw are beginning to flower with the remaining at various stages of buds only.

Loads of QCs was paranoia and my experience is just getting a few as you describe. It was the wholly unpleasant thought of having to shake bees off all frames to find all the QCs in a double brood that lead me to unite them as I did.