We checked the 23 colonies left on the Herefordshire oil seed rape site. All the colonies have been split and as a result are not yet showing signs of swarming. All colonies had a minimum of four frames of brood, some had as many as eight and each has two supers, some with three.We use full depth supers which are interchangeable with brood frames, this means that we are able to put brood frames above the queen excluder and empty frames in the brood box. The advantage is, we can increase space in the brood chamber and have "queen free" brood frames and bees above the queen excluder which can be used to make nucleus hives for queen mating and increase.
We moved the three colonies left at the old site and had time to pick up enough frames of brood and bees to make two queenless colonies ready for cell raising next week.
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