2010 has been an excellent year - one of the best that Chris can remember. His colonies have swarmed extensively and Chris has had his hands full to mange the artificial swarming and also the inevitable natural swarms. We started the visit by looking at one of Chris' 'mini nucs', similar to an Apidea but of homemade design. Chris abhors killing queens so has used some of these to house excess queens. One part of the box is filled with fondant and the other part contains 3 very small frames into which the queen and a couple of 'handfuls' of bees are placed. They then start their own mini colony for later use elsewhere. These would not survive a winter as have insufficient bees for clustering.

We then moved on to full sized hives. Chris has several nuclei which have been formed either intentionally or as collected swarms. Chris opened up a twin nuc which has 2, 5 frame nucs inside a normal sized brodd box split in the centre. Chris, along with other members reported a very long delay between colonies losing queens to swarms and rearing a new, mated queen. This has been as long as 5 or 6 weeks. Both of the nucs we looked at here, and all other colonies had queens now in good brood production. Chris identified the queen in this colony and member Neil Cruickshank offered to catch and mark it using a new queen marking cage he had recently bought from Thorne's. Chris has been feeding some of his colonies with heavy syrup. His recipe is a rule of thumb method; he tips sugar into a bowl and pours water on top until the water level reaches the top of the sugar. This is then stirred until dissolved.

After opening 2 or 3 colonies, identifying and marking the queen and closing again, we moved over to a couple of bait hives complete with caught swarms. These have been placed on top of pieces of old telegraph poles, setting the hives at around waist height. This, Chris says, is the ideal height for a swarm looking for a new home. The first one of these we looked in was being treated for varroa and being fed. Chris was using thymol crystals sprinkled into a flat cage that the bees cannot enter. Both colonies looked healthy and had laying queens, one of which was spotted and marked.

We then retired to Chris and Pat's house in Bampton for tea and cakes. Everyone was astonished by their superb garden which, like his apiaries, has been established over the years with a combination of hard work and Chris' understated level of knowledge and skill. Chris is a very modest man, but has skills that shine through in his beekeeping and clearly extend into the rest of his life.