Bees getting active

The recent mild weather has meant that the bees are venturing out of the hives. They aren't in vast numbers at the moment but today was warm enough for them to be out and about and I saw them returning with pollen. Hopefully that means there is brood to feed or the hives are getting ready for some.

As we are already experiencing spring weather, despite still being in winter, we will need to bring forward our plans to add an extra brood box to each hive. The purpose of this is to double our number of hives. Over the next couple of months, the bees will fill the brood boxes and when it comes to taking them away, they should be full of brood, bees and queen cells. We will aim to leave the queen in the existing hive. In the new hives set up with the brood boxes, the new queens will hatch and stay with the colonies. We did this a couple of years ago with one hive as an emergency as we found it had lost its queen in March. We added the brood box to another hive to merge them but separated them in May. Each went on to be a strong colony.