Get set...

Temperature: 15C
Weather: Cloudy, showery
Stings: None

It looks like all the swarm preparations have worked out pretty well. The colony with the old queen is now very healthy. I took down a super of drawn comb for them to start filling as the next couple of weeks (Wimbledon fortnight) are peak flow season. When I took off the crown board to put in a queen excluder I saw that the bees were already building comb above the frames to store honey. I scraped off the excess, set down the super and hopefully they'll make good use of it in the next few weeks.

The colony raising the new queen is doing fine too. I reduced the number of frames they were on to reduce their workload as there are not many bees to keep the colony ticking along. I've not had chance to check the frames and see where the queen cell us but I did notice what looks like some queen cells that have been torn down. I'll have a better look next week. I've also given them a bit of food to keep them going as their numbers are dwindling and the weather isn't great. It takes about six weeks for a colony to start building up again with a new queen so they might need quite a bit of help to survive.