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So things chug along quite merrily. If I have a complaint about my bees it's that they love gumming things up. I've seen it noted that Hoffman frames attract Brace comb and mine is certainly no exception. Still, that aside things seem to be progressing nicely. The first super is being nicely drawn and starting to fill up. Possibly a little ahead of schedule I've added a second super and started to cycle drawn comb into the top box and foundation down below. We've got a huge stack of foundation ...

A month on, and finally we had a nice warm Saturday. Were the bees building up explosively? Was I going to see swarm cells? Massed ranks of drone cells? Would they need a super?

Hardly! The queenless one had gone, the one in the middle was down to bees in the super only with a small patch of eggs on one frame, and the 'strongest' one was down to a couple of frames of bees and brood in the brood box and in the super.

It is going to be a long, slow spring build-up from ...

I did various bits of futtering about with the bees this week.
On Monday I checked the strongest colony and it had 7 frames of brood and a lot of bees.
I put a shallow in the middle of the brood nest to encourage them to build drone comb below.
Out of curiosity, I checked on Wednesday and the shallow was laid up with eggs and they had started to draw drone comb below. The box was bunged with bees and I decided to put a second brood box of drawn comb above and lifted the frame ...

'Into my hive an air that chills
From yon far country blows ..' intoned the Queen

“I beg your pardon?”, said one of her retinue.

“It's poetry”, said another, “A Shropshire Bee, if I'm not mistaken.”

“Quite right, though improved by myself.”, said her maj.

“She's quite the polymath, our queen.”, said a bee on the edge of the circle.

“An autodidactic polymath,” added another, not wishing to be outdone.

...

Finally, finally, finally. Making the most of the lovely day to finally get my hands in the hive. Although my eagerness to get the lid off the hive was somewhat tempered by one of the neighbouring plot holders coming over to introduce herself and let us know she's prone to anaphylaxis from bee stings.

It took all of 3 second once she made her way to the gates for the smoker to be lit and the suit to go on.

So let's get the numbers out of the way, right now there's: ...