Well, after a slow and unseasonably cold start to the month, June came up trumps with the weather and finally we have had some beautiful, hot days for the bees to get out and forage. There is now so much nectar coming in we have to be careful when doing inspections that we don’t tip it out of the frames! 

Throughout June we have continued to supply nucs in British Standard, Langstroth and 14x12 sizes. As you can see, the good weather has encouraged lots of growth in brood and therefore in bees. The problem we sometimes have during these spells of excellent forage is once we’ve made up a nice, strong nuc, we then have to prevent them from swarming before they go out! This can be a bit of a balancing act, making sure the bees have enough space still to forage and lay, but we’ve learnt over the years how to overcome this - mostly!

Managing so many bees we do get the occasional swarm and they are not always in the most convenient or easiest of places to retrieve. We still have to get inventive with our collection methods every now and again, as you can see here! 

We feel like we have achieved a lot this month – we're exhausted anyway! Next month we are hoping things calm down a little now we have taken the majority of the nucs off. It has been a busy season, crammed into a few weeks but that’s the way it is sometimes with bees! Next month will be largely standardising colonies so they go into the autumn at roughly the same strength. This helps us prepare for winter (yes, we’re already thinking about it!), making sure that we don’t have lots of variation in size and strength of colonies going into the cold months.