Ivy honey, North Walsham swarm, Normans allotment bees

I have been away from my bees since the 20th of last month. A long time at this time of the year and I have lost some bees as a result. In the allotment they were under attack from wasps as I was packing to leave and some of the nuc boxes may not have been able to defend themselves. Even the strong GW hive has a collection of dead wasps and bees under the entrance.

They have also been short of supplies and any it seems that only now new honey is being put into the frames. On the way into the allotment site I noticed bees on the first of the ivy flowers to open and as the weather is warm it is likely to be ivy honey that they beginning to store.

I have started to feed. I removed all of GW's supers that were empty yesterday and put on another brood box with frames from some of the failed nuc boxes that need cleaning up. On top of that I put a block of fondant. In the next week I will try to put feeder buckets on all of the hives and transfer the bees in nuc boxes to brood boxes. I intend to split up GW and take her in one brood box to another apiary. Then I will put newspaper between the remaining two brood boxes and replace some of the frames in the top box with a small nuc with a laying queen that is in a bee brief next to the hive. Given that the bees in the bottom box accept her they will all have a good chance of getting through the winter. They will need constant feeding for the next couple of months.

The queen cells from the German queen had successfully produced new queens in Norman's allotment hive and the North Walsham swarm hive. Both of which I have marked. However both hives also had queen cells in them. I took the queen out of Norman's brood box with a couple of frames and put her in a nuc box leaving a frame with two queen cells in the brood box.

The frames I had removed and put into a nuc box with the original queen cell (the reason I put in a frame of eggs from the German queen into Norman's brood box in the first place) also had a laying queen. But I couldn't find her to mark.

The NS hive had a brood box under a super and most of the activity was going on in the super frames two of which have queen cells. I put those frames into a nuc box with a couple of others and after marking the queen put her in the brood box with a queen excluder between that and the super.

I have no way of knowing how old the queen cells are so they could hatch before I find a home for them.