I went to inspect the bees first thing after breakfast. I should really have done them by yesterday at the latest, since that was ten days since the previous inspection. In theory, if they had decided to swarm immediately after the last time I looked at them, then by yesterday they could have had a new queen sealed inside her cell waiting to hatch, leaving the old queen free to abscond with half the bees and the honey. However, I was out yesterday and on Tuesday, and working over the weekend, when it was far too windy anyway. It was a bit cool, breezy and dull this morning, but the forecast was for it to get worse rather than better through the day, so there didn't seem anything to be gained by hanging around. The best placed people to be beekeepers must be those who are fully retired or work from home, and have no pre-arranged social life, who would be entirely free to stick to their ten day inspection limit, and pick their weather window.
Fate was smiling on me. There were eggs in the two main hives, showing that the queens had been laying at least until very recently, and no queen cells, showing that they had not yet begun to swarm. I even saw the queen in one of them, on a day when I didn't especially need to, striding around purposefully on the comb in one of the middle frames. I made sure I put that one back very carefully. The sub-optimal weather had made them a bit grumpy, but not dangerously vile. The third hive had managed to go queenless over the winter, and on 8 April I gave them a frame from one of the other hives containing fresh eggs. The textbooks say that they should use these to rear a new queen. I hadn't been right through that hive since, on the grounds that if they hadn't managed to make a queen then I'd give them a queen cell at the point when the others started to swarm. I had a quick look today, to see if they had sorted themselves out, and saw uncapped brood, demonstrating that they have made a queen, and that she has successfully gone out and got mated without coming to any mishap like being eaten by a bird. I shut them up again without looking at the other frames, given that I'd found out what I wanted to know, and the weather was iffy.
Neither of the big hives had put much new honey or nectar in the supers in the past eleven days, which makes me think that the dry weather really is affecting the nectar flow. I'd better feed the small colony, as after their queenless hiatus they will be short of workers. They won't do anything useful this year, but if they build up to a size where they can survive the winter then they might give me a crop next year. Unfortunately, the big colony I used to give them the frame from which they reared their new queen has turned out to be not as good as the other, less productive and not as placid, so it's unlucky I didn't use the better one.
I wore my beesuit into the house, and stood in the kitchen for a few minutes before taking it off, listening for buzzing. I retrieved two bees from the window, and one from the door of the fridge. I think as many beekeepers get stung after they've finished opening the hives, at the point where they take off their protective clothes, as during the inspection.
One of the friends at yesterday's lunch is the secretary of our local beekeepers' association, who gets the phone calls from the public about swarms. She says there have been very few so far this year, though she has had a lot of calls about bumble bees and wasps.
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