Sunday June 16th ~ Hive Inspection on Father's Day

On our own today and a good inspection

The colony is growing albeit slowly and the queen easily spotted

Frame 4 and we have a little capped honey

Close up of capped honey

The queen is spotted on Frame 5

Queen

I spotted 2 play cups and was going to rub them out as that is what we'd been encouraged to do at the association apiary but Percy wasn't convinced so we had a bee-keepers discussion and they were left for a week. We shall check them next time

Play-cups on the top edge of a frame

 Percy also thought he'd seen a few cells with multiple eggs so we must keep a careful watch on what is going on. Maybe our queen is getting on a bit :-( We have no idea how old she is.

We did a little moving of frames around turning frame 3 around and then swapping it with frame 4; we will see what difference that makes next week. The old frames in the middle of the colony are pretty old and gnarled so ideally we would like to gradually move a couple to the outer edge and then swap them for new ones. 

After the hive inspection we thought we should have removed the entrance restrictor as the days do finally seem warm enough and we thought it might encourage the colony to make a move outwards.