Spring Hive Inspection

This week while carryout a hive inspection on a colony in a friends garden, I was surprised to see that the colony was so big – I estimated that there were around 60 – 70,000 bees. What was more surprising was that I have already split the colony and moved half of the bees to a new site to try to stop the queen from swarming about a month ago and she had replaced most of the bees already. Now I have split the colony a second time, by artificially swarming the colony and this time into a second hive in the same garden.