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Opened up my first modified Snelgrove II AS today. After seeing a good pattern of worker brood, I have tonight united both parts over newspaper. There are 10 frames of brood altogether. So a nice strong colony for when our lime tree 'avenues' hopefully start to yield! :) fingers crossed! So...

Ooooo...Pleased to hear that. I have a new apiary site with a field of field beans over the hedge. Might have to move a couple more hives there in preparation!

So true........

Yep, reckon the waiting is finally over! Another warm one tomorrow too! Hopefully in a couple of weeks we will all have lots of newly mated queens producing perfect patterns of worker brood :)

Quite envious. I have a few virgins waiting to get out and reckon today was probably the day but have been too busy to do much watching! Found open brood from the new queen produced from my first AS of the season. So looks like she did manage to get out sometime in the last week or two...

I took off some OSR supers today ready to extract in the morning. Some are capped, some not but the shake test was ok. They are currently sat stacked up in my nice warm boiler room so hopefully that will keep them runny. On removing them from the hives, I did notice that some of the frames have...

:iagree: Last year set the bar very high here!

Just been to collect my first swarm of the season. Such a nice family who were really interested in what was going on. The children were full of questions, apparently I am going to be the subject of 'show and tell' at school tomorrow. Wish all swarm calls were such a pleasure!

I don't think so but I did wonder about that! I will trust that the bees 'know best' and let them get on with it!

How common is supercedure at this time of year? I have a hive with 10 frames of brood with a 2014 clipped queen. It's currently got 3 alomost full supers sitting on top :) so to my eyes it's a pretty successful colony. Six days ago on the centre of a frame I found one large cup with a single...

Personally, I always leave them a week after the unite to settle down. Inspecting just a few days later may have panicked the bees resulting in a balling?

Yes my vertical ones have all worked ok so far. In fact I just remembered I have 3 verticals, one at another apiary too. Same set up as you describe and with 3 supers separating the brood boxes. One has a queen emerged on the 11th, one about now and the other wont emerge for another week or...

Yes, I've done 6. :) All gone like clockwork so far except one. Two were done vertically with a snelgrove board (now like tower blocks!) and four done using a new position about 6 feet away. Not sure what happened in the failed one but after repatriating the clipped queen, she laid up half a...

Thanks for that feedback Icing Sugar. I'll not worry just yet then. It seems that your queen didn't wait for the magical 20 on the thermometer, she just got on with it! I'm sure mine will be fine. It's actually been a pretty good week here so far! So fingers crossed.

Played 'hunt the queen' in one of my hives. Crafty minx had somehow got through the QE and was laying in the bottom super. Checked through 6 of the colonies. All doing really well. So well that I'm already out of supers! Tonight' will be spent in the shed making up some more! The last 2 days...

And it was all going so well......Now I seem to have lost a queen in one of my artificial swarms. Arghh. All the clues lead me to conclude that I missed spotting a queen cell last weekend in stage 2 of the process I was following and she's blimmin swarmed. Either that or she's playing hide and...

Yes, would love to see a picture too. Sounds like a character!

You are not wrong......, BBC weather are saying 23 degrees here on Wednesday! Almost Pimms weather ;)

Yes I do agree, 'old' in this instance was not written to imply aged! ;) I have one of Exmoor Bees buckfasts now in her 3rd year going great guns - no sign of slowing down yet. I do have another on order though, to be waiting in the wings so to speak.....!

This weather is so frustrating. I've got 6 AS virgins due to emerge from tomorrow (ish) and through the next week or two. As far as I can see, the forecast for at least the next 10 days is not great. If it carrys on like this,I'll end up having to reunite using my old 2014 queens! Can somebody...