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.

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.

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).