One and a half hives

Progress so far :

• we received a swarm from Richard, Hive A. This seems to be growing steadily with eggs and larvae. We have not seen the queen live, but have identified her in photos later.


• a second swarm from Richard went into the top bar hive, but absconded. The remnant did not survive


• the third swarm in in Hive C, and appears to be queen less after 3 inspections. We have multiple eggs per cell, the odd drone cell and brood.

Our initial plan was to take a frame of brood from Hive A and put it into Hive C, but we did not want to weaken Hive A. We have now just purchased a fertilised buckfast queen from Scotland and are going to introduce her in the supplied cage.