It's a week since the bee inspector went through all of the hives in the allotment and suggested using drone brood for mite removal.
I did put some frames of drone brood in the following day but I really didn't like opening up the hives two days running and left the remaining hives to do today.
The bees in the south facing double brood box hive on the student's permaculture society allotment were not too happy about being confined to the bottom brood box and had started making just one nice big queen cell slap bang in the middle of a frame. I had to destroy it to see if there was an egg laid in it but there wasn't. Generally there were eggs being laid and quite a few drones around. Maybe they don't like the queen anymore. The hives that I have put drone brood into don't need an inspection again for two weeks - but I will give that hive an inspection in one week just to see what the bees are doing then.
The other hive I spent some time on was the Thorpe allotment hive where the bees came from Thorpe (Norman's bees) but mated in the allotments. It's on a brood and a half and I want to mark the queen. I couldn't find her and put on an extra queen excluder on above the brood box and an extra super on the top. Hopefully on my next visit I will find her in the brood box or in the super that is now sandwiched between two queen excluders. They were doing well.
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