I'm like the bees...

When it's raining I don't get to do much interesting, well not in terms of writing about at any rate.

The third hive on site at the moment is finally going to move to a new home. The owner had hoped to place it on his allotment but somewhere along the line fell foul of "The Committee". A visit from the president of the local beekeeping association, giving his seal of approval to the site, held no dice so we've let stay in situ until he found a new site or sorted the situation out.

A few weeks ago I spotted an ad offering to host a hive or two in an orchard that looked like it might be close enough to where he lived. As it's turned out, the site is ideal and both he and the owner of the land are looking forward to the bees arriving.

On the downside, his hive is much stronger than either of ours and we were hoping it was going to be a donor of brood frames into the smaller hives. We will at least get a chance to do at least one swap into each hive over the next two weeks before his leaves for pastures, or Orchards, new.

Basically, what we're looking to do is to take a frame of mostly emerging sealed brood, minus the bees, from his hive and swap it for a frame of mostly eggs and larvae in the smaller hives. As a rule of thumb, one frame of brood will produce 3 frames of new bees; so by swapping immature brood for emerging bees we'll get a quick boost to the number of bees in the smaller hives which will mean they can draw new frames for the queen to lay on sooner and hopefully help them expand a bit quicker than just left to their own devices.

That's the theory at least.