A strong sweet smell of honey drifted from one of our hives (Patience) and we couldn’t wait to inspect and see how the bees had been getting on. They had sure been busy, unfortunately they had built across the bars rather than along them. 
This is not uncommon, after all they are wild creatures and do what they like despite our best endeavours. This though makes it very hard to lift individual bars and inspect and a few combs broke off. This shows the importance of regular hive inspection.
We were advised to tie a comb straight along one of the bars, hopefully they will follow this going forward. 
We also found a couple of hive beetles that were duly dealt with. We did manage to harvest just a drop of honey to taste and look forward to a full harvest later in the year and thankfully we didn’t annoy the bees too much.
beeagainstpoverty.org 