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Better than ending up with the Q in the super!

Inspected the 12 colonies I haven't checked yet this year. Was worried about the first one as they're really swarmy bees and I missed them swarming on 14th April last year. Opened them up and multiple sealed cells,lots of bees but couldn't find the (clipped) Q, youngest brood was about 5 days...

First inspection on 9 of mine today (7 colonies and 2 overwintered nucs) All queenright and laying very well ranging from 5 to 9 frames of brood. Sealed drone brood in most but none emerged yet. All have plenty of stores and there was a decent amount of nectar about too. Bees were pretty chilled...

First really good foraging day of the year round here and all hives really busy on the goat willow. Scraped the floors and crown boards on 10 of mine today,all are very heavy and averaging around 6 seams of bees,they are way behind where they were at this stage last year which suits me fine as...

Hefted and fed a few lightish ones in preparation for the pretty deep cold spell forecast for next week.

Hi thanks for the reply. I don't really have a business plan,i'm not that organised! You say your association insurance covers this,do you know if my BBKA insurance would cover me if I was doing it for profit?

Yes I got 20 basic full suits from Simon the beek in his closing down sale £1 each! Not sure how good they will be but when I do it i'll be using my most docile colony and moving it to a new spot the day before to bleed off the flyers so hopefully they will be adequate.

How do folks. This year i'm thinking about running some ' beekeeping experience days' for non beeks at one of my apiaries . It will probably just be small groups of around 5 people for roughly 3 hours with a brief introduction to beekeeping followed by a look inside a hive then maybe some honey...

I've not seen this before but it def looks like bee eggs. possibly the queen has started laying but because the bees are clustered the brood area is very small so she is laying multiple eggs per cell and the workers are getting rid of the extras?

Wasn't too impressed with the sale this year,no where near as much available as in previous years, still managed to spend £300 though :(

Vaped all mine today using my new Gasvap so much easier than lugging a heavy battery around and no need to remove entrance blocks to vape. Boy do they get hot though,got burnt even with my leather beekeeping gloves on.

Bees able to get out for the first time in a couple of weeks,lots of cleansing flights and LOTS of dead removed (200 to 300 per hive) never seen this many dead removed before,something to worry about?

A balmy -3c this morning so decided to do some full inspections :biggrinjester: Only joking but did take the chance to scrape off last years excluders which was a nice easy job with the very brittle wax.

I used to make these gift sets but they were a right pain,each one took me about 15 mins to make and there was a lot of cost involved. Now I just buy some gold organza bags (about 20p each) and people can choose what they want to put in them.

Had a look at the entrances today just as the young were doing big orientation flights,lots of nice young winter bees in evidence and more importantly no crawlers with DWV . Still lots of balsam and ivy coming in .

Some more pics of my bees.

No I bumped her off eventually.

Here's my stall

Best year ever for me, average yield 60lbs per colony and that's after splitting them all!