The bee inspector

We had a visit from the bee inspector to the allotment site. There are four bee keepers on the site with a total of (I think) 23 hives altogether. No serious problems were found and as Neville emailed he was "... was very impressed with our standards and the general quality of our bees."

He found the bees on Students permaculture plot the hardest to handle but generally liked the others.

The bees in my hive next to the WBC had moved the cluster to one side of the brood box and had made enough drone brood under the shallow frame at the edge of the box for the inspector to do an uncapping test for Varroa. There were mites present and to my mind too many. I was saying I would put an Apistan tray in there now but the inspector advised not to as it would "put the bees back three weeks " and that I should put a frame of drone foundation in next to the brood but not the split the brood. I sure in the past I would have done exactly that and put the foundation bang in the middle. By getting a frame of drone brood laid and capped and then removing it I would be removing 75% of my mite population.

I marked a few more queens.

As it was a sunny afternoon by the time the bee inspector had finished I checked the hives at Thorpe and Postwick.

I think I will loose the middle hive in Thorpe. I put a couple of frames of brood in from the old queen's hive but fear I will just have wasted those.

I have started pulling the double brood boxes apart in Postwick and putting the queen in the bottom box under a queen excluder.

I marked the swarm queen.

The bees in the 'old queen's' box have not decidecd to make another queen cell. The nuc box was the only one in Postwick I didn't open today.