At the beginning of May I split some of our colonies in an attempt to stop them from swarming. I had limited success – some of the splits decided to swarm anyway. We collected the swarms… this meant that we ended up with rather a lot of boxes of bees on our roof. Small colonies are generally weak colonies. Strong colonies are able to defend their hive from robbing bees and wasps, are less likely to be wiped out by disease and also collect more nectar to make honey.

This week I decided it was time to recombine some of these colonies. This always causes a bit of chaos as it takes a little while for all the bees to find their new homes, but it is worth the fiddling around in the end.

So, now we have 3 strong colonies. I’ve noticed that the wild blackberries are just starting to flower and that there are buds on the Lime trees, so with luck the bees should be able to take advantage of the flow of nectar.

Sadly the lime tree avenue close to our hives was pollarded over the winter, so there won’t be any honey from them this year.

When we combine two colonies we separate them with a sheet of newspaper. It takes them a day or two to nibble through it and the theory is that by then they are used to each others smells and won’t try and evict each other.

The cold wet weather has meant that I haven’t been able to inspect our hives in Hendon until today. As soon as I opened the hive that I artificially swarmed a couple of weeks ago I could hear a virgin queen “piping”. Some people call it quacking, but whatever you call it, it sounds like high pitched morse code!

She was there, on the first brood frame I lifted out. The workers had removed a flap of wax at the end of the queen cell and she was just peeping out.

Within in a few seconds she marched out – isn’t she beautiful?!

I’m now hoping for a calm, warm day over the next week so she can safely take her mating flight. We will know if she has made it successfully if we see eggs being laid in the comb in a few weeks.

For all you lovely, patent people who have been in touch wanting to know when we’ll have some honey available – here is the news:

The bees are working very hard bringing in nectar – you can see it glistening in the comb. Once the honey has the right water content so that it won’t ferment,the bees cap it with wax – you can see that they have started to cap this frame already. It is difficult to judge exactly how long it will be before there is enough to extract, because it is so weather dependent, but the day is coming closer!

Swarm season is upon us. Typically people say that colonies swarm between May and July, but our colonies have other ideas. Bees swarm to create a new colony. It is an entirely natural process and actually rather fascinating. Most beekeepers attempt to prevent swarming because once a colony has swarmed you have lost a good deal of your workforce.

We have one very strong hive at home and one at Hendon, a couple of weeks ago I noticed that they each had started making queen cups, which are special cells in the comb to grow a new queen bee in. Last week I saw that the queen had laid eggs in these which means that the colony is preparing to swarm. I decided to artificially swarm both of these hives, which involves splitting the colony into two hives. Thank goodness I had spare hives ready! In one I put all the brood (along with the queen cells, that will turn into new queens) and in the other I put the queen and all the flying bees. This is supposed to convince the bees that they have already swarmed. So far so good…

Two days later we were having lunch, A looked out of the window and remarked that there were rather a lot of bees out – my heart sunk – we had a swarm. We raced up to the roof to see bees pouring out of the hive that I’d put the queen and the flying bees into. Luckily they clustered in a tree on the edge of our garden and I was able to retrieve them easily.

Here they are clustered in the tree

And here they are going into my nuc box (a mini hive)