When producing your own food, we become so reliant on the weather.

If it's too cold or wet, the bees are reluctant, rightly so, to leave the hive to forage for food, if it's sunny and dry, they may go searching for pollen for the developing larvae (hatched from eggs but not metamorphosed into adult bees yet) but may not find nectar as the plants need the warmth to produce it. So if we've had a spell of nice weather, the queen is laying lots of eggs (up to 6,000 a day in summer) and the colony are preparing for growth and then it turns cold and wet, we could have a problem. First, the food could run out and the bees risk starvation, secondly, the colony starts to grow quickly with more mouths to feed and less food coming in. If the expanding colony starts to 'grow out of' the space in the hive, they may decide to split in two by rearing a new queen and encouraging the old queen to leave, with up to half of the adult bees, to find a new home of their own. This process is completely natural, yet when the leaving bees move out as a swarm it can seem quite scary to us humans. As bee keepers, if we inspect the hives, frame by frame during swarming season, we can try to anticipate what the bees are planning and can help them find a new home in a spare hive if need be, to prevent us losing them or distressing our neighbors. However, back to the weather, there are often times when we plan to inspect the bees and then decide not to open the hive due to cold or wet conditions. If the inspection gets delayed too long, we may miss crucial signs that indicate that they are planning to swarm and may end up trying to precariously collect thousands of precious food-producing insects from the highest point of a tree!