This month we have finally been able to get out and do some proper beekeeping. With the wonderful warm weather over the Easter bank holidays, we had a bit of work to do after that to stop any colonies from swarming. To do this, we carried out artificial swarms on all the ones that were big colonies and that had swarm cells. This is not always a fool-proof method of stopping swarming but it does generally take away the impulse to swarm so you don’t lose a lot of your bees to a primary swarm at least.

Spring is a good time to sort out combs too. Any old frames this year have been swapped for foundation. This minimizes disease and gives the young bees something to do because they are the ones that draw wax.

Old combs can be melted down and the wax can be then swapped for foundation. One frame had a broken lug which had to be replaced – at some point this was probably full of stores, heavy and may have been dropped too hard into the brood body, causing the lug to snap. This was replaced with a frame of foundation.