I have been babysitting a nuc for my buddy because he made it up at his apiary and he didn't want the bees just to drift back to their original homes. I must have had it since mid June. It has been nothing but trouble....he was about to sell it, when it swarmed in July. Since then there has not been any period with a properly laying queen.. [I won't bore you with the long story] I put in the fifth test frame today having seen only a handful of eggs. They are in the bottom of the cells, suggesting...

The new Somerset queen is laying nicely, and the nuc and the rest of the colony had combined, so I reduced them to one BB. I marked and clipped the Somerset Beauty.

Checked the trays for varroa. There wasn't much, but more in some colonies more than others. Most hives had 5-15 in a week (thymol treatment still on all hives.) One had over 50. That is interesting because they have been treated the same and are close to each other.

I sprayed the frames of the stored...

I brought home distilled water tonight to try to calibrate the new refractometer. Well it doesn't use water as a calibration fluid does it!!! It uses oil. That took about an hour to establish, and that was after I had spent 20 minutes looking for it and more or less accused family and friends of having got rid of it because I couldn't find it.

Then started to try to calibrate it with olive oil, and couldn't get that right either and the calibration screw fell on the floor twice...

I went back to the allotment today to see if the Somerset queen was out of her cage. She was and there were eggs.....I think they were her eggs, as they were more or less vertical in the cells still and I made the nuc up 2 days ago, so I would expect the eggs to be almost lying down in the cells by now if they were the eggs of the old mean queen.

I couldn't see her though, but I didn't want to mess about with the nuc because she can't have been out of the cage long, so I didn't...

Took a while to find her, but she is no more. Made up a nuc too, so the new beauty can go into that.