Half-time

Heatwave 2.0 has been and gone, Prime Minister 9.0 appears to have been (amicably?) decided {{1}}, and the newspapers have instead reverted to saturation coverage of the 'soccer' World Cup. In the hope of also attracting some errant Google search activity I've used a sporting term for the title of the post, though it was primarily chosen to reflect the stage we've reached in the beekeeping season.The June gap has closed again. It wasn't very protracted, and most colonies continued to find bits and pieces to forage on. The only ones that needed feeding were mini-nucs and my queenright cell raiser. The former because the foraging workforce is simply too small, and the latter because any break in nutrition — at least during the ~5 days between grafting and the new cells being sealed — is likely to result in sub-par queens.Flowering blackberry, Ardnamurchan, early July 2023The blackberry is now flowering well, and it's probably the start of the main summer nectar flows. I say 'probably'…