On Bank Holiday Monday, the 5th May, Rugby Beekeepers attended the Rugby Spring Fair. This was the first time the event had been held since Covid arrived and it was great to be able to take part again.

During the day there was a constant flow of visitors to the stand


As always the observation hive is a favourite especially with the younger visitors


The queen is definitely in there and the people lucky enough to find her went away with a sticker!

We also had a good selection of our members honey for sale and during the day many jars were sold. A lot of people wanted some as they felt it helped with hayfever. This may be due to our honey not being heavily filtered, so pollen grains from the local flora are in it.

On Sunday the 4th of May we held a training session for our newer members on how to identify a colony that was preparing to swarm and how to implement a swarm control method to stop this happening.

We had 12 people turn up and three committee members carries out routine inspections on the colonies, we then decided on a colony to 'split'.

I have to apologise as my heavily propolised gloves that failed to operate my phone's camera. This resulted in all attempts to take pictures of what we did resulting in naught!

Sadly, we didn't find any of our colonies that had 'charged' queen cells, but we did find one that we decided was very likely to produce them in the next few days. We moved this hive to another position, just over four feet away and placed our prepared nuc in the original hive's position. We then carried out a ‘Pageden’ split on the colony. A demonstration of this can be seen here