Breakout

She said she was pleased I was well enough to visit - unusually she appeared in this sparsely populated area of only the second frame we picked up - as if she had come out to greet me. I pointed out that she is less than 1km beyond the garden wall - and we came by car! 'One step at a time', she said. I suppose you think that way when you have six ungainly legs, and an abdomen full of everything necessary to populate a hive

Given the weather we have had, I thought we might be crisis-managing - an overcrowded colony, getting twitchy and contemplating a swarm. Not at all; all was calm, the hive a balanced machine, everyone knew their job and was quietly getting on with it

They are a little crowded, though. The extra is the hint: comb built in the narrow space between the top of the combs and the ceiling. Interesting to see cells torn in half lengthwise. Scraping this up was entertaining: this colony is so calm that all my means of persuasion failed to get them to move, intent as they were on retrieving lost nectar. I scraped very carefully, to avoid injury, then shook or picked them off the collected wax. We gave them a whole new box to spread into, and left the wax scrapings for them to suck dry

Don't miss the fresh-laid eggs in the cells beside the queen - standing on end, as they do until they slowly fall flat after a couple of days. The machine ticks on