what a yummy sticky mess

We really have been blessed with some lovely weather lately. It was such a pleasant morning I thought I had better check the progress of the merger today. I should have done it on Sunday but the local children were playing football at the club next to the allotment (it is probably a good idea to avoid having lots of smoke an flying bees around to alarm mummy while little Jack and Chardonnay are playing sport). So today I checked the new frames in the busy merged colony and they have started to build plenty of honey comb so I could move the queen to the new brood box. I was an relativity simple procedure once you have found the queen she is likely to be in the main brood box and she should be easy to spot because she has a blue spot on her thorax (A blue spot signifies she was born in 2010) as queens usually live no longer than 5 years so a 5 year colour cycle exists, White is years ending in 1 or 6 Yellow is 2 or 7,Red is 3 or 8, Green is 4 or 9, and Blue 5 or 0. So once she was found she was moved to the new chamber and the old brood box has a queen excluder (the queen is much bigger than a worker so an excluder allows the workers through but the queen is trapped) and a hive entrance placed on top then the new box with the queen on top of that so all of the old box can hatch the brood already in place (and there is lots of it) over the next 3 weeks. The exciting part of this event is that I have extracted about 5KG of honey this afternoon, a very fun sticky job.