You may have seen the wife on Countryfile. I personally feel a bit put out, I hung around that camera crew all day hoping they would preserve me for posterity; I made tea, provided cake, fetched, carried and stood about in the rain and cold, yet for nothing. They chose instead to film my pigs and dog.
Today was spent knocking up flat pack hive floors, I was managing to nail them together in just under three minutes each, that's 20 an hour, that's faster than the rate at which spitfires were being produced at the height of WWII. If only we'd been able to fight the Luftwaffe with hive parts.
This year my goal is to have 100 hives or more and my business has seen a marked investment of late. The internet is a wonderful thing; it really does pay to shop around. I have ordered brood boxes and roofs from Newcastle, floors from Gloucester and frames and wax from Wales. It should all be arriving next week so I'll have a blitz on assembly for 3 days. I was toying with the idea of buying a nail gun for the job but my wife is teaching me not to live beyond our means. I am therefore going to employ a local lad to help me with the hammering. Young people wouldn't fall into drugs and crime if beekeepers gave them more meaningful employment.

I have recently discovered the delights of 'first' equipment. I usually buy 'seconds' which according to my father-in-law is because I am a Northerner. You certainly get more frames for your money when they're seconds and of course, you get that warm bargain feeling that lasts all day. However, it wasn't until last week that I realised just how nice it is to deal with firsts. The joy of effortlessly pushing frame pieces together, it's like they were designed to fit. Amazing. No splits, splinters, no knots, warps: it's magical. When I am a millionaire I will buy firsts all the time, then, as I promised myself when I was eleven, I shall take a year out and collect as many different species of dragonfly as I can catch, and display them in an oak cabinet.

I heard a chiffchaff today, my first migrant of the year. It sang as I hammered, both of us enjoying the sun. I saw the long range forecast on Countryfile; uninterrupted sunshine all week, could we hope for a better start to the beekeeping season? I gave in to temptation last weekend and looked through all my colonies, bit naughty really, as it was a little on the cold side. I just had to know how many colonies I had so that I could work out how much equipment to order. Last year I only observed flying bees as an indication of winter survival and later in the spring discovered that there were 3 colonies with living workers but no queens. By opening up the brood box I was able to see evidence of laying and queen survival. My investigation was very pleasing, I have only lost two colonies and the range in amount of brood between different hives was remarkable. Two of my hives had three frames of brood each whereas a couple only had a patch the area of a 50p.
Most of the colonies had a frame's worth of brood. Also, while I think of it, owing to the fact that there are relatively few bees in the hives at the moment, the queen is either obvious or reasonably easy to spot. Next week I'll be back to mark them all with some nail varnish. I am not going to clip my queens this year. In recent conversation I was told that laying queens, though already mated during their nuptial flights, may try to mate again and having only one wing may hinder them somewhat. I deem it less of an evil to lose the odd swarm rather than to lose the whole colony through collapse of a non-laying queen.