May Inspection

Finally after almost a month of not being able to inspect any of my hives due to constant rain the weather changed.  Good thing it did as I found lots of sealed queen cells in two hives, went through both colonies and found both the old queens so quickly artificially swarmed them both by moving the queens and several frames of bees into new hives to simulate as if they had swarmed as I had a couple of spare nuc's on me, also transferred 3 more frames with some brood and the bees covering it making sure none of the transferred frames had a queencell.


Opened up a nuc and found a drone laying queen so removed her before pinching a frame with two nice looking sealed queen cells and a large amount of sealed brood and donated it to the nuc.


At the start of the year I set up a bait hive with several drawn combs. Today I found it has a nice gentle colony in it, they have obviously been in there for over a week as there is a nice patch of sealed brood across the middle of 3 frames surrounded by lots more eggs and larvae. After going through all my other hives just to check they are all queen right with lots of eggs and brood in all stages so I can safely say the swarm wasn't one of mine. 


Just need a few weeks of reasonable weather now so the virgins can emerge and get out and mate.