Sunday 20th August 2017
Julie called me today with the news that the bees were swarming again!
When I got home there were 5 small swarms in our neighbour's garden. Given the history and their small size they would seem to be cast swarms. Apparently we had failed to remove all the queen cells except one from the hive as we attempted to recover from the swarm last week.
Fortunately, I had already ordered another Nuc and the clusters were all low down and easily accessible. So we put all 5 together into the new Nuc and left the virgin queens to fight it out.
Hopefully that is the swarming for this year done. Although the time left for the victorious virgin queen to mate and start laying is really very tight.
