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Hello fellow Beekeeper

The time has long passed since first begining with Bees and the Joy and excitment was a truely wonderous thing to first behold my own bees,many older Beek's seem to forget they too once felt such joy and have become blinkered in there pursuit of doing whats right by the bees and the newcomers.
Many being judgemental for whatever reason is no excuse for throwing coldwater onto some newbees and there enthusiasims but alas the newbee's are the future ...

I know, its only March. The sun came out and stayed out, the wind had dropped, and I was still fretting about the level of stores. So off I went ...

Parking in the usual lane behind the big wall, I picked up the usual bits and pieces. The jacket and veil with the metal hoop sticking out. Hive tool. My favourite smoker, now sadly with a few holes nibbled in the bellows from a winter in the shed with the mice. Bag of crumbly bits of wood. Camera. Newspaper, but not the lighter ...

At last! Sunny, dry, nearly warm, and it was time to set their ladyships up for their spring expansion. Lovely clean floors all round and the old floors carefully stacked with their debris ready to be sent off in the post.

This winter we experimented with polystyrene insulation above the crown boards for all, and dummy boards and polystyrene in place of unused comb for the two nucs. We couldn't have known just how severe the winter would be but the experiment ...

Yesterday I checked the final two nucs and found that one was down to two frames of bees but no queen whereas the other had just a handful of bees and a queen. The one with the queen is a colony I overwintered in the garden shed which had barely 2 frames of bees in November. It's surprising it survived at all given the lack of bees for heat generation in the winter we have just had.
I decided to combine them rather than loose the bees from the queenless nuc.
I brought the queenright ...

Ok. I know it would read better if it were St Andrew's day update but today was a public holiday combined with a temperature of 14c so I got a chance to check quickly through a few colonies.

I was able to have a look at eleven in all with inspection time limited to 5-10 minutes in each case.
All had some brood and I saw ten of the queens including several of the ones I still have to mark. I will wait a few more weeks until I get a warmer day as there is no rush.
In one ...