What a difference a year makes! As I wander through the silence of the Cathedral, making my way to the spiral staircase that will take me to the roof, I am reminded that only a year ago we were celebrating Manchester City’s Premier League title win. The Cathedral was bustling with people and equipment the excitement was infectious. It feels sad that today there is just me.

The bees are really getting busy. I have been visiting weekly and keeping watch over the them. Our first split of the season is done; never seen a 14×12 brood box with 11 frames of brood before. Just waiting on the rest to catch up and will split them too.

I found and marked all our queens, so we have one pink and the rest are now blue this should make it easier to find them when the time comes to split the colonies.

No 3 hive had 11 frames of brood, I decided now was the time to split the colony to stop any swarming before next week when I can visit again. The queen, now marked blue, is in hive No3 with all the flying bees and all the brood frames were moved to No2 hive. You will remember Hive No3 is the Arnia hive with the camera in so couldn’t move the brood box had to move all the frames out instead. It took some time to sort out as I had to go through the frames twice to find the queen.

Catching Queenie.

Hive No 4 our pink lady is doing well.

The flying bees are bringing in lots of pollen and storing nectar. This will split in the coming weeks and increase our stock.

Seeing red pollen going into the hives probably from the horse chestnut, still seeing yellow from the Dandelions too.

Hives No 2, 3 and 4.

Hive No 7 one of our newly marked blue queens, I really struggled to find this lady and was about to give up when there she was lovely long and quite dark. Lots of bees in the hive making it hard to find the one I was looking for. The colony is doing well filling supers and will also split in the coming weeks.

Hive No 8 this one gave me trouble last week. You will remember it is double brood the bees were using the top brood as a super and filling it with stores making it very heavy. Couldn’t just take it off as it was filled with bees so put it over a crown board above the supers hoping the bees would take the stores down to the supers below. Being tall with long arms helped but it was still a struggle hefting the big box on top thought at one point I might have to go and ask Stuart for help. Managed, just, to get it up there and now empty of bees but still some stores in it I have taken it off and given more supers, so the bees have somewhere to hang out.

Hives No7 and 8

Another quick check of the roof and made sure all the gutters were clean. Put the kit away updated our records and all done until next week. Some photos of my bike ride home along the Rochdale canal.

Geese	New Islington	Swan at New Islington