Some honies and bumbles on the fuchsias in my back garden. A few wasps (Yellowjackets) hanging around. Watched one hawk and grab a honeybee on a flower. It was a big fight and lasted a few minutes, but finally the wasp won and flew off with its burden over the garden wall.
Added a proper hive stand under my hive as I was worried the bricks were not stable enough. That hive is packed and busy and now five boxes tall.
The top box is almost all honey, but a few frames have small patches of legacy drone cells that I’m waiting to emerge. That top box is the original box and has the original 6 DN4’s from my nuc in it. The rest of the frames are medium / 190’s. I’ve been working that box up so it will become all honey and I can extract those frames and get rid of them and the eke. But as I’ve moved the box up, the queen keeps laying a small band of drone along the bottom of the DN4’s.
I’ve but box 5 in the #4 position, so maybe the gap and heavy flow were having will deter her from laying in those frames when the space frees up.
I’m feeling a little better about my beekeeping now. When I was putting the stand in place, I needed to disassemble most of the hive and I’d never been in such a huge cloud of bees before. A month ago that would have shaken me. But yesterday I just carried on and felt not so bad about it. There was a prayer or two in the back of my mind to Apis the Goddess of Bees to keep me safe, it it was good. In the end, some lovely people in the apiary came and gave me a hand to help put it all back together again.
Running "Foundationless All Mediums with No Queen Excluder". Each box is national spec, but 190mm deep.