Today's inspection

I thought I would try and capture a bit on film today, almost forgot, as you can see the hive is open and the first frame is out on the hanger.

My god there's a lot of bees in there, has to be getting up to full strength now, anybody's guess whether there's 30K or 40K bees in there, I knew all was well with the queen because plenty of pollen was being flown in, it was until 9th frame (the slightly cleaner one on the video), that I found her royal highness, this frame is my drone culling super frame, I wanted to cut the drone brood away but she seemed quite happy on it so left well alone.

We're into the swarm season now and whilst she is last years queen there is always a chance the colony might think about replacing her, so a careful inspection needed to catch any queen cells (queen cells mean a swarm is on it's way!), I found a few queen cups, these are like practice queen cells, so does this mean they are thinking about a new queen? Only time will tell, I had better have that nuc box to hand for future inspections so that I can put the frame with the queen on into the nuc with a few other frames from the hive to give her a start. The theory is that then the colony won't swarm and I can either re-unit the colony later in the summer or allow her to create a new hive.

I did see a few waggle dances on the frames, first time I have seen them :-)

I finished the inspection with a sprinkling of icing sugar to encourage

them to groom each other and in the process dislodge a few varroa mites.

When I put the roof back on I noticed lots of bees had left the hive, never seen this before, I wonder what that's all about?