Weather: Sunny with showers
Stings: None
The first proper visit of the year. I've been down a few times to check the bees have been okay but not as much as I would like as the weather has really caught me out. In previous years my visits always seemed to coincide with a period of good weather. This year the weather has been so changeable that every spare moment I could have gone to check them over, I've been stymied by the rain or the cold.
So I was a bit worried about what I would find. Not least because I got the feeling that the unsettled weather had left the bees confused too. It's been warm, but not that warm, then dry and hot and now cold and wet. Not a great situation as it might have encouraged the blossom to emerge but the cold and rain might have meant the bees couldn't get out to harvest the forage.As it is, the bees look fine. They are on five of the combs I checked and starting to draw cells on a couple of the others. I spotted the queen and she looked stately and well. I moved her down to a brood box full of fresh, drawn comb and later this week I'll go through them again and remove that frame she was on and swap it for a fresh one. I'll also shake the other bees into the new brood box to none of the drones get stuck above the excluder.
I didn't have long to check through the hive but I did notice quite a bit of drone brood. If I'm lucky, I'll be able to remove this later this week and that should reduce varroa numbers for a while. All I need on my side now is the weather. So far though, it's not looking great.
