Plenty of bees, honey and space.

Lovely day, so we popped into the bee coop. 

In short it all looked good, bless: plenty of bees, honey and space. No queen cells. 

We had a quick look at the feeder we'd reaffirmed the cappings in on top of Malka's 3/4 hive, bees are still in it collecting their honey back. 

We inspected Rachael's 8-deeps boxes and removed her miticides (only 2 weeks late). We didn't see her but we saw plenty of her work. Her bees had built a fair bit of drone comb between boxes and she'd laid drones in it. Here's a photo of some after removal, very glad to say I have seen no varroa in them yet. 

New season's honey

This week the bees have found the pond we made for them last year! 

We took the space suits off the hives for summer, and wiped up lots of ants living between the insulation and the hive on both. We left the tin foil hat on Rachael's hive; they're not prone to conspiracy theories, as far as I can tell, they just don't have a warm hat otherwise. 

We checked inside Malka's 3/4 hive today, all smelt and looked good. I saw 3 day old eggs so sometimes laying, and capped worker brood, so that hive has a queen. We swapped out 6 frames of honey that looks dark and yummy for some clover honey and some drawn frames. 

I took the white baseboard out from Rachael's hive and it was full of water but smelt ok, I didn't see any varroa but it might be hard to tell with the water so I've cleaned it and put it back to check our 24 hour  varroa drop rate. We looked carefully in the windows and things looked fine but it was getting a bit late so we didn't go into the hive, instead we started the extraction process. 

I expect to add photos to this tomorrow.