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The UK has been experiencing a heatwave for at least six weeks:

Source: UK Met Office Weather Observations Website

The bees have been fine. There has been forage and there are water sources for them to use. We have not been fine. It's hot and we're not used to it.

A few days ago I put on my bee suit at 4pm and in under 10 minutes I was drenched with sweat. Sweat dripped from my nose and puddled on the visor of my veil. It soaked my t-shirt and my socks and ran down my chest as I leaned over. It wasn't nice.

This is a downside to bee keeping. Suits are really hot. If you have an angry hive it also helps to layer up under your suit -- which makes it even hotter. It's enough to make you want to be a low intervention bee keeper who inspects mostly be examining what falls out of the hive :-)

It hasn't only been hot. It's been very very dry. Weather stations around Oxford show that there has been rain in the county, but in Headington we've seen only about 3 occasions of rain during the 6 weeks, and those were only a few minutes of light rain. Oxford city and Headington seem to have lower rainfall than the surrounding county. It may be the topography, but equally it could be my imagination.

The consequence of this extended hot, dry period haven't been too bad. The winter was wet so we haven't had a drought. Most deeper rooted annuals and perennials have been fine, with excellent flowers, fruit and seeds. There was almost no June gap in flowering, possibly because the cold spring delayed the onset of flowering. Grass has fared very badly where it's been cut and I expect to see heat stress affecting trees which we'll see for several years. The grass has particularly affected the look of the heatwave, with brown parks and gardens. Where grass has been left uncut it hasn't been badly affected.

Cooler Autumnal weather is on its way. There's even rain predicted. I'll be interested to see whether it turns up.

My hives are surrounded by at least half a dozen wasps which want to rob them. They zig-zag in front of the entrance; they crawl in under the Varroa screen; they wait at the edges and drink from the water tray. They want the honey but they can't get in.

All of the hives in central Oxford have small doors and strong guards. Three of the four have at least 20 bees visible on the outside of the hive entrance. One hive had fewer visible but appeared to be just as effective at guarding.

Having so many Wasps around makes it hard to open the hives. Once robbers get in they are more likely to return. They're as happy to gain entry from the roof as through the door. I think that they're also more likely to successfully return and re-enter the hive because they smell of the honey from that hive. Robbing can become a storm which only abates when the hive is moved out of range of the robbers. That's a lot of work just for a look inside.

Robbers notwithstanding, I took a very quick look inside the hives in central Oxford to check that none had run out of space. They all have sufficient space for the moment. They are also all dropping pollen, which suggests they're still laying and there  is forage for them. There is plenty of door activity at all the hives. I found no Varroa mites on the base board. I was some evidence of Wax Moth and some evidence of new comb.

Colony 1 in Headington is also faring well. There are some wasps, but fewer than in central Oxford. There is pollen being dropped and plenty of door activity.

Things seem to be going well in all my colonies. They're all busy at their entrances. There are wasps near the entrance to every hive but they don't appear to be getting in. The Varroa counts are very low and there's pollen on all the base boards.

Colony 1 still has ants infesting the base board so it's hard to be confident that I'm seeing the whole story. Certainly the bees are still removing and dropping crystallised honey -- presumably from last season. They are bringing in pollen which suggests they have unsealed brood. There are brood cappings which suggest that they also have emerging brood. All good signs. I saw what I took to be wax moth around the hives but I may have been mistaken.

Colony 11 is still vigorous. It has pollen and cappings on the base board. There was a smattering of wax platelets indicating new comb. I looked hard and found one solitary Varroa mite. It was alive.

Colony 04 is collecting pollen again which suggests that it now has brood again. I suspect that it took a break an unconfirmed swarming event in late June. There may be some wax moth in the hive but otherwise everything looks good. I found one solitary Varroa mite in this hive too.

Colonies 08 and 12 are doing fine. Bringing in pollen; keeping out the wasps. Colony 12 had about half a dozen Varroa mites, all dead.

I'm curious about why there are so few Varroa mites visible on the base board. The season is getting on and I would expect to see a lot more. I have ideas about what is going on which I'll put into another blog post.

There may be a problem in Colony 4. There is no pollen on the base board and there are Wasps which are not being challenged at the entrance. This suggests that supersedure or swarming may have left them without a Queen. There is evidence that mature brood is still hatching out.

The Wasps are becoming more persistent. I saw at least half a dozen around the hives at dawn. If they get access to the hives then they'll rob until there are no stores left.

There might be other reasons why there isn't any dropped pollen. They might not be finding flowers (although other hives have pollen on their base boards). They might be really careful.

I think that more investigation is needed.

I was away from Oxford for the last week of June. It seems that there was a swarm on the tree in front of my out apiary on 28th June. I suspect that this was from Colony 4.

I have no real evidence that this swarm was from any of my hives. There seems to be less going on in Colony 4 -- less pollen on the hive floor for example -- but I can't be sure.

This morning I worked on colony 13. I hope that this is the last time I have to make a significant reorganisation of their hive. I hope that I've corrected for the mistakes and difficulties which developed from having a nucleus roof with comb attached.

This is a summary of the colony before and after I did the work this morning:

The main problem before the reorganisation was that the brood nest was above the Queen excluder and so on the wrong side for Queens and Drones to leave the hive. Another possible problem was that the brood nest was too far away from the hive entrance. I have seen that brood nests which are too far away from the entrance may be more vulnerable to robbing. This happened to Colony 9.

I thought through my operations carefully before I started work. Even then, I initially left the queen excluder in the wrong place. I moved the B Hive body and the super above it off the hive. I then removed C Hive body and replaced it with the B Hive body.

When I had chopped the comb out of the nucleus roof I had laid it flat in the super above the B Hive body. All the brood had hatched from this so I scraped it off the top bars and put it into the feeder box.

I assembled hive with an empty super above the brood nest. I hope that the bees will move the honey down from the feeder box and from the comb in C Hive body into this super. We'll see whether that happens.

Colony 11 is complicated. I may have just made it better, or worse.

The colony was probably evicted from a roof in the Grandpont area of Oxford by building work. A member of my bee group said that the colony was too aggressive for a domestic garden so I gladly took them. They arrived in a nucleus box which had no frames.

I had already moved them out of the nucleus body and later I tried to extract the nucleus lid but couldn't complete the task. Today I tried again to get the lid out. I succeeded, if success is about objectives. It wasn't an unqualified success.

I prepared, giving extra attention to my feet and hands and to ensuring that the wind didn't blow my veil towards my face. I then opened the lid and lifted the nucleus lid to look. A cloud of bees unhappy bees took off. It really was rather busy.

I had chosen the middle of the day because I hoped that more of the defensive foragers would be out of the hive. This is a colony which feels massive. Whether they were in or out it still felt massive.

As I lifted the lid I found that the comb was arranged across the lid of the nuc' rather than in line with it. When I lifted the nuc' lid It caught the edge of a frame and a large slab of comb with brood and honey came away. I wanted to recover the comb; I wanted to remove the lid; I wanted an orderly hive which I could expand when I needed to. The more I wanted, the more complicated things became.

Another slab of comb came away and so the thing was decided. The lid comes out entirely.

I ran to get more hive parts. I placed the comb in sections on top of the frames of the hive body and then in a super. I don't expect most of the brood to hatch out but they might. I then put the hive back together and left the area.

Looking back, I probably should have stopped when I saw the brood. The bees were very upset, understandably.

I peeked at Colony 13 inside Hive H. There is nothing there: no comb and no cluster of bees.

I was uncertain whether there was a Queen after I'd found a dead Queen in the swarm box. I had put on a feeder on to stimulate them but I'd seen robbing in progress from Colony 11. It appears that robbing is all that's going on.

I don't know what has happened to the bees which I put into the hive. They may have dispersed to the other colonies on the roof.

When the feeder is completely empty I'll be able to see what is left.

• Elder
• all varieties of Rose
• larger Daisies
• garden and hedgerow plants in smaller numbers

The buttercups have finished.

Colony 13 is dropping Varroa. They are also cleaning out old comb so there is a lot of debris on the hive floor. I found 2 or maybe 3 Varroa bodies.

This colony is new to my apiary, having been established elsewhere. I haven't really included it in my Varroa Zero post because it's new. Hives D and G are included. There were no Varroa on the floor of either this morning. There doesn't appear to much activity in Hive D at all. I shall have to check them.

I don't hold much expectation that Colony 13 will thrive. It is a small colony and vulnerable. It is building comb, but I still don't know whether there is a Queen. I haven't opened the hive. I've only looked at the hive floor, where there were wax platelets.

I had put a feeder on the hive a couple of days ago. My intention was that they should use he feed to build comb and concentrate on growing larger numbers of brood. There isn't much forage around and this is a small colony.

The consequence, predictably, is robbing. Colony 11 can clearly be seen flying between the hives. This doesn't have to be a short term problem as long as there is food in the feeder. In the longer term I may need to move the hive.

There are also wasps around now. The conditions are getting tougher.

I regularly examine the floors of my hives. The stuff which falls out of the hive tells a story about what the bees are doing. I always look for Varroa mites. I've found none on the floors of any of my hives for several weeks. I don't know why.

Mites on the hive floor can indicate how many mites are living in the colony. Varroa live for between 27 days to about 5 months (source: Managing Varroa, National Bee Unit, 2017). The mites require bee brood to reproduce so it's not surprising that there are fewer mites in the early part of the year. What is surprising is that I'm finding no dead Varroa at all in well established and very active hives.

We had difficult weather in spring. The temperature started to warm and then fell dramatically. This led to a number of colonies dying of complete starvation or isolation starvation. Dead colonies don't support Varroa. Live colonies do, but only in cells with brood. I wonder whether this has interrupted the mite life-cycle and knocked them back. I do not expect to find any colonies where Varroa are entirely absent.

I have 6 occupied hives. Three of these are new colonies. I expect to have lower drop anyway because they arrive only with those Varroa which cling on to swarming bees (during the phoretic part of mite life cycle). I have one established hive where there is an Ant infestation. It's possible that the Ants are taking away the mite bodies. That leaves two established colonies which have brood but are dropping no mites. That's a small number of hives, but striking anyway.

There will be more to say about this later.

The complicated rearrangement of Hive C left a problem: a gap of a few millimetres where the nucleus box meets the hive body. Every time I approached the hive the bees from inside behaved defensively and I smelled the distinctive alarm pheromone (it's an ester somewhat like Bananas).

I had tried to block the hole using a hive tool pushed up into the gap. The hive tool fell out. I shoved folded newspaper into the gap but the bees became so angry I decided to back off before all the gaps were filled. I thought that the gaps were filled but I was mistaken. The bees were quite cross.

This morning I returned with tape. The gaps are all now taped up. I hope that the bees calm down now.

This afternoon I returned to the box within a box which contained Colony 13.

It was placed with it's opening almost directly in front of Hive H. How could they not be delighted with the hive and march straight in. Perhaps the bees had other things going on. I decided to act.

I brought a large white board up to the mouth of the hive and bridged it with white paper card. I then carefully removed the inner box and shook it onto the board. To my dismay the bees started going over the edge of the board but not into the mouth of the hive.

I took the bee brush and brushed some towards the hive mouth. All of a sudden the march into the hive  began. A stream of bees walked in, leaving some behind to fan the signal where they were. Hived!

Hived? There was a striking bee corpse on the white board. It was a Queen. She was larger than the others and had the distinctive rounded thorax (middle part of her body) and longer abdomen. Some bees clustered around her.

I moved her body onto a piece of white paper on top of the hive. Then I went away to eat. The bees were  gathering on the paper and flying wildly around. I went back to the hive and put the corpse and the paper into the body of the hive. Within a few minutes almost all flying had ceased.

My bee group says that it's not uncommon for a cast to have more than one virgin Queen. Prime swarms are led by the old Queen and are very unlikely to have any other Queens with them. Virgin Queens will fight, so perhaps this Queen was killed by a rival. She didn't appear to be damaged, but the double box arrangement was not a good idea.

Later the same evening I put a hive strap on to the hive and took it down to central Oxford. It'll take a few days to find out whether this swarm will survive. I don't have much expectation if it's a small-ish cast swarm in June.

I was called today to an unusual situation: a swarm on the pavement outside a house on a fairly busy street. When I arrived the bees were like a splat on the ground. They were next to a low Privet hedge, so I suppose that they'd fallen out of that.

I spoke to the house owner and got a box. This covered the splat while I went for my swarm catching equipment. When I returned they had started to cluster on a flap beneath the box. I had brought a larger box so I carefully placed small box with bees inside the big box.

I moved the big box off the splat site and laid it on its side. The unboxed bees started to march inside. Some stayed to fan the direction to the others. It was all very orderly; very calm.

Once enough bees were inside I gently closed the flaps and took the box home. I'd spent less than 45 minutes, including getting my equipment. At home, I propped the big box next to the entrance to Hive H. When I get home they may have marched into the hive; they may have found somewhere better; or they may still be there.

The source of the swarm is unclear. I've been called to other swarms on the same road so either someone is keeping or there is a feral colony along the street. It could be either.

The monotone beige of the tree pollen has given way to more diverse colours. I think that there are 8 colours in the image. I haven't tried to identify the flowers which these pollen come from.

This sample of pollen colours comes from my apiary in central Oxford. There are parks and college gardens nearby so some of the flowers may be non-native.