Errr

Temperature: 18C
Weather: Warm and windy
Stings: None

Hmm.
Image via Wikipedia
Old hive - going very well. They have filled an entire super (pretty much) in about 10 days. So I added another one to give them some more room. Now I have to consider what to do if/when they have filled that. I'm tempted to give them more brood comb to draw so I can build up my stocks but am also torn about getting a good crop from them. Two supers will be about 30 pounds or so of honey, maybe more which is plenty. I've got more customers than before but I could struggle to get rid of/sell more than 40 pounds.

New hive. Is fine. But I'm not sure why. I went this week all ready to give them some brood from the other hive as I thought there numbers would be dwindling. I opened it up and there were a lot of bees. I looked at the frames and there were eggs in lots of the cells. Plus larvae and capped brood, including drone brood.

I split them at the start of the month but that seems very quick for it all to have happened. Too quick. If all things happened exactly as they should then she could have been laying early last week. But brood is capped on day nine and that means 28 days is too short. I'm not complaining, I don't think. But if it is not the queen they raised where has it come from? There is a tiny chance that the bees in the hive are from the swarm on the tree. But that's so unlikely that I don't think it's a real possibility. Plus I checked the colony at that time and they were all there so there wasn't much chance that they'd be ousted by that other lot. Maybe they were getting on with it earlier than I thought. There's only a day or so in it. Hmm.

Anyway, it means that the next problem I have to confront is whether and when to unite them. I could keep them separate and see how they do but that does mean buying lots more equipment.