Splitting the brood has not worked as far as I can see. I now have more boxes of bees than I want, most of them without many bees in them and without laying queens, and I am afraid I have been responsible for sending out several swarms. I hope none of them have caused too much of a nuisance. All I can do now is try very hard to find and mark the new queens, assuming they are in there somewhere and will start laying in due course, then I'll be better placed for swarm control next spring. And next year I'd better start putting supers on really early, even before it feels warm enough to do an inspection. And if I could avoid having a semi-permanent four month long cold all through the start of the season that would help, as it made it very difficult to stay on top of things. And beyond that I'm stuck for ideas. Get less swarmy bees?
The warm dry weather lasted just long enough for me to work my ways through the hives without rushing. I'd have liked to check them yesterday, but a cold wind was blowing and the field next door was full of Eastern Europeans planting lettuces, then fixing up the irrigation system. If yesterday's weather had been perfect and the forecast for the next three days completely vile then maybe I'd have decided that opening the hives was the lesser of two evils and chanced it, but in general I try not to disturb the bees when there are farm workers busy in the next field. I haven't had any trouble from any of the hives this year or last, but you can never be entirely sure. Even nice bees could have an off day, and I don't want them displaying inappropriate guarding behaviour and randomly stinging any harmless Lithuanian lettuce planters who just happen to be standing on the other side of the hedge at that moment, or deciding they don't like the vibrations from the tractor engines.
Bees can be funny about motors. If you are ever mowing or strimming grass anywhere near a beehive it always pays to keep an eye on the bees, in case they are getting annoyed. If they start bouncing off your head then that is their polite way of telling you that they don't like it, and your chance to back off before they sting you. Of course if you bash your mower or strimmer into the hive itself then you very probably will get stung, and have only yourself to blame.
The forecast afternoon showers arrived, but were mostly so light that I could have worked outside, just taking shelter from the sharpest ones, but I decided that it was officially raining and time to catch up on some of the rainy day outstanding tasks. There are generally lots of those. I blame the Clacton coastal strip effect for the fact that it has taken me approximately four months to change the lightbulb in my bathroom, but today I did it. It is a ceiling mounted light with a glass cover that is a pig to unscrew without dropping it, and the bulb is a weird halogen capsule that you can't just buy in a supermarket but have to go to an electrical specialist or track one down online, and is then really fiddly to fit. Plus the other two bathroom lights were still working so I could still see, especially as the days got longer, so all in all there were lots of reasons to put off fixing the light, and the new bulb has been sitting in a padded envelope for weeks since I managed to decipher the faded letters on the old one and find one like it on Amazon. But today was the day, although I fell at the final hurdle and had to ask for the Systems Administrator's help in fitting the new bulb.
So I am an inept beekeeper and an incompetent electrician, but at least this afternoon's cake came out well. I love baking, but it's another rainy day job that means we have more cake in foul weather than fair. I made honey flapjacks, and this time paid more attention to the injunction in the recipe to leave in the baking tin until cold, and the flapjack came out of the tin in slices instead of half of it staying stuck to the tin in an overall effect more like granola than biscuits. I cooked a honey and sultana cake as well while I was at it, since both will keep for days. And what's the point of having lovely home laid eggs and not baking with them from time to time?
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