With the past winter being my first I was a bit concerned my bees were very slow building up in spring.
While there have been lots of reports of others making good honey crops mine have been making nothing and all bar one hive were still in the bottom box with roughly 4 frames of brood a bit of pollen and nectar a few weeks ago.
Bit of a difference yesterday, they have all exploded the past 2 weeks, all now have the bottom boxes full and the top boxes 50% with a little brood in the top boxes.
We still haven't had a day above 30c with average temp for this month being max 24c and min 7c. We were still getting overnight frosts until early this month and the ave max for Oct was less than 20c. Seems the bees know exactly what they are doing, noticed the first blackberry flower yesterday so should really kick off in a week or so and the bees look like they have timed it perfectly to take advantage of the flow.