It’s a Wednesday evening, but the first time we’ve been able to get back to the bees, what with the kid’s exams, weather and just general stuff. But the merger seems to have gone well. Much of the paper had been eaten away, and the frames in the brood box had sugar syrup stored in them (it looks much whiter than honey stored the same way). And as we went through the frames, we found lots of laying, lots of brood, and lots of stores. It all looked very healthy.

So, we put the part-built out frames the swarm in the Nuke had been working on into the brood box with those already in there – having first removed some of the over-building they’d done from the side of the frame open to the space in there – and then put the feeder back on.  There was still some sugar syrup in there, so we didn’t add more.

Then we moved onto the main hive.  Emily was doing all the work, as we have our Basic Beekeeping exam on Sunday, and she’s not done a whole inspection on her own before.  And we found that this too had lots of laying going on, and lots of everything stored – they’d actually emptied their feeder, too.  But also we found a number of queen cells, and even more drone cells, both mostly sealed.  It looks like they may swarm again, and here’s us with no frames in our Nuke box now =O(

We opened a couple of Drone cells, looking for Varroa, but didn’t find any.  Maybe we’ve been lucky.  But we still don’t want to treat until we’ve lifted the honey harvest off.  Hopefully some frames will be available soon.

Now to talk to Simon about the possible swarm, and read up on the various types of diseases before our exam on Sunday.

Oh, and by the way, http://www.beebloggers.com/?ln=ben looks like it could become an interesting aggregator.