Despite our terrible losses over winter, we seem to be doing well to recover with the warm spring we’ve been having.
Today we went through the strongest of the original nucs we took off Cleo back in the spring, marked the queen (who is laying very strongly) and upgraded them into a full (wooden) hive, as they were rapidly running out of space. I think its time to Christen this hive Sarah!
We put in drawn frames to give her plenty of space to lay, so hopefully she’ll come on well. There was no sign of the marked queen in the other nuc, but there were eggs and larvae, so either she’s adept at hiding, or the capped queen cell that had been there has hatched and taken over.
No signs of eggs in the swarm nuc, or in the split hive from Cleo, but its early days yet - queens seem to be taking their time mating this year - possibly due to a lack of drones coming out of the winter?
Cleo however, despite us taking off 3 nucs, and splitting her (a split that swarmed!) had wet queen cells in. We knocked these down to slow her down for a week, but a Snelgrove is looking like an option here.
