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Thursday and Friday for us. My wife’s doing a couple of workshops so to keep me occupied, I signed up for the mead making one.

Weighed the 3 main hives and all have about 20lbs of stores which is about the same as last weekend. Not going to fill up on ivy this year and so put feeders on to keep them busy while it rains.

Cleaned up a load of stuff, fixed a couple of queen excluders and reasonably neatly stored it all for winter. All hives busy and looking like good ivy foraging weather next week.

Probably end of October for me in London. Weighed the 3 main hives last weekend and they had about 15, 20 and 25lbs of stores so will give it further 3 or so weeks to see what ivy they bring in and whether they need feeding. Not set in stone though as the weather could drastically change from...

Quite sad that I’ve never seen a European Hornet in our garden apiary or the surrounding area 😢

We just had our spring 2022 results back and it was 55% Forget me not.

Chilling out with the chooks and the bees. Limited room for humans in our garden.

Over twice what we harvested last year and that was our previous best. Spring was exceptional and we took off 70kg then. Summer was mixed weather but dry whilst the lime was out. No surprise that our best hive by some way was the one we kept together and didn’t need to do swarm control on. How...

Just did our summer extraction and got about 100kg from 4 hives. The weather in London doesn’t seem half as bad as other parts and didn’t notice that the bees had eaten the stores. Used the club honey room this time as didn’t want to trash the kitchen and use our manual spinner.

Booked the club honey room for 11 August. Upside is a purpose built room with a big electric spinner. Downside is having to cart the supers back and forth. Hasn’t been much forage around for a few weeks now but fortunately the weather has been dry enough for the bees to make the most of it...

Checked a couple of hives yesterday and moved a nuc to a dummied down 8 frame hive, adding a frame of stores and a frame of emerging brood. One for the new allotment apiary when we get it properly set up. Booked the club extraction room for a week Friday as expect to have about 16 supers to...

Thanks @Swarm and @blackcloud . Scaffold netting looks great and inexpensive. I'm now looking at posts. Would you go for something like Fence Post Spikes and 75x75mm wooden posts or are there better options out there?

Just got a plot on a new allotment close by for keeping a couple of hives on. What do people use and/or recommend for ’fencing’?

Some of the Lime trees on Ealing Common are coming into flower as the bulk of the Limes are on their way out. The later ones have darker and more shiny leaves but not sure if they are just covered in aphid gunk. Unfortunately only a small number of Sweet Chestnut in the area but I must get...

After looking at the nuc earlier, I got a frame of emerging brood from the strongest hive to put in the nuc. The hive I took it from has drawn out a deep with foundation in 4 days and is beginning to fill it. Another nuc that I let swarm through lack of attention now has a laying queen and has...

Checked a nuc that is making a new queen and found her laying well. The nuc is rather light on bees though so plan to give them a frame of emerging brood from the biggest hive. Downside is that the biggest hive has 4 shallows and a deep to lift off before I get to the brood.

We’ve got shed loads of maple and sycamore trees around us. Not so much hawthorn. About a month ago the garden had a definite farmyard smell about it as the bees were drying the nectar. Probably not much if any of the smelly stuff was in the supers we extracted as they were full by then.

Fantastic spring in suburban London. Best hive was 21kg from 2 supers. First super was medium/light in colour and the second was very pale. Must save some for the club competitions although won’t get dark honey to make the trio. Total was 72.6kg from 7 supers on 4 hives.

There’s a couple of Indian Horse Chestnut trees on The Common flowering at the minute. Spotted a few bees on them unlike the Lime which seemed to just have a few bumbles foraging.

Put a ‘brood box’ with foundation above the QE on the biggest hive. Couple of foundationless frames in there as well hopefully for chunk honey. Have already extracted and replaced two supers on the hive but still had to lift the 4 supers off one by one. Put another brood chamber on a nuc that...