Where did the summer go? I swear we were just doing Springtime splits only a week or two ago.

As I’ve said before, this has been an incredible season for the bees. The warm weather started early in the year and has pretty much held until last week. Summer’s been hot, but there’s been enough rain and at the right times to keep everything growing.

Gardeners around here are reporting bumper crops of just about everything and it’s all early, too. The owner of our easternmost yard (just outside Lansdowne, ON) has pumpkins ready now and he’s picked his beans 5 times! Much of it’s due to the weather, but he’s sure that having a couple of booming hives 300m away has made a difference too. Just wait until next year when there’s six or more hives there.

Greg’s doing something that we love to do: stand behind the hives and watch the foragers come and go. You can quickly get a sense of where they’re going, if not exactly where. He’s in the Lansdowne yard. It’s on the Western edge of 5 acres of clover and east of 90 acres of Crown land, so they never have any shortage of forage.

That tall thing on Greg’s left is a stack of nucleus colonies:

They’re actually double nucs. The whole thing 1/2 the length of a full hive, but there’s a divider in the second to make two 5-bar hives. Yes, they’re strapped down to an empty hive.

We set them up three weeks ago and they and the neighbouring full-sized ones are doing wonderfully:

Normally, this would probably be the hive’s last batch of brood. But, if we have a warm fall like last year, they could be raising more for a month or more. As usual, we can only hang on tight and enjoy the ride. It’s part of the fun, y’know?

You can read every beekeeping book ever written, but the important thing is to think of them more as rough guidelines, not hard and fast rules. One of the very first thing you learn as a beekeeper is that none of them have read the same books as you and they’re going to do whatever they want. Ya gotta roll with it and let them. They know what they’re doing. The sooner you realize that, the happier you’ll be.