So Sunday was a nice hot day and of course a good day for a swarm.

As usual, I launched in with no gloves and due to some poor trig, the bucket to collect the bees was not quite under the ball and they fell all over my arm and stung cause they were not happy at all... Hello Mr Crab Claw.

We also managed to install "La-Boheme" into an inner west community garden where they will be happy bees with lots of forage.

It's been very warm the last few days and there are lots of swarms happening around Sydney. I collected one in a tree yesterday; this is what it looked like before...

I returned after dark to collect the hive and had the pleasant smell of honey in the car all the way home so they must have drawn some comb and stored the honey they were carrying. It's a much better smell than the remnants of smoker smoke that usually fills my car.

So Spring has finally arrived and with the promise of a good beekeeping season, I removed the queen excluder two weeks ago from a couple of my hives in preparation for splitting them into two as a swarm prevention strategy.

Well the queen has been busy! If you look at the shot below there were many bees covering all 12 frames of brood - a perfect hive split prospect.

Now this is a healthy frame of bees and brood.

One of the hives was a lot smaller; it's been in a position that didn't get as much sun during winter and serves as a good example of why sun is important when it's cold.

If you look closely below you can see some bee communication going on.

One of the hives was clearly ready to swarm despite all the room I have given them so we took this queen cell to make a nucleus hive along with another frame of brood and honey.

So we ended up with two new hives and a nucleus hive after the splits were performed.