Bees in June. And May.

June has been a blur. As was May. Same with March and April. Four months of the non-stop roller-coasting that can be beekeeping in Spring.

I try to take the long view on the season and it works sometimes. Kind of.

Queen rearing, taking splits and making nucs got going late April/early May with decent mating weather and queen returns were good. It's so nice when splits end up with mated queens instead of laying workers. Other than those 3 hot days the first week of June, it's been a really nice Spring. Warm enough and dry. For whatever reasons, the bees didn't capture the Maple this Spring like usual. The pollen flow was heavy, resulting in them clogging up the brood chamber with it in many hives. It makes me wary of swarming when that happens. Swarming. The biological imperative of bees. The bane of the beekeeper. Swarms are such an exciting and amazing force of nature. Except when they're your bees that swarmed away into the trees. Happily, we didn't see the mid-June wave of swarms like last year. As I've been putting on honey supers this month, I keep thinking back to last year and how I was finding colonies that had swarmed with new queens leaving behind 3-4 boxes of honey. They never fail to make me stop and wonder why?

Bugs in boxes that might sting when provoked. Insects that we choose to spend our days with.

I spent a fair bit of time experimenting with virgin queens this Spring. Along with being fun, it was quite intriguing as well as exciting when I started to realize some of the possibilities afforded by using virgin queens in addition to queen cells. Introducing virgins requires a different scenario and protocols than when using mated queens, but after multiple attempts with a couple of successes but far more failures, it started to come together. By mid-June I was having good acceptance and successful mating of virgin queens. It's fun to realize "success" when working with the bees. The challenge then becomes in replicating that success in a semi-predictable fashion. Like all things bees, there is a learning curve to navigate when introducing queens whether mated or virgin and like all things bees, the more I think I figure something out a little bit, the more questions I'm left with.

While the Maple didn't really materialize in the honey supers, the Cascara and Ceonothus showed up with its butterscotchy goodness and bright yellow nectar providing a nice bridge to the blackberry bloom.

Summer arrived with close to 1" of much welcomed rain. Anymore, a good soaking rain mid to late June seems to have become a novel event. Will it cause things to bloom that we don't normally see bloom without a good June rain? At the very least, the hope is that it will benefit and possible even prolong the blackberry flow. We'll see.