Its well and truely autumn. Checked the bees this morning and to say they were a bit defensive would be a major understatement. Its been a hard season for them with the heat and dry and when trees are in flower it seems to be a drizzly day lately. Anyway having sixty thousand pissed off females around surely reminded me why they have those pointy bums 
Cheers
Rob.
Great post, thank you! Here, it is obviously spring. 
We went out to an old, empty hive this afternoon, to clean it up after it was damaged in a winter storm a month or two ago. Oh my! It was full of bees!! Not robbers either, bees with eggs and uncapped brood and overall a pretty nice demeanour.
As we are very urban, we searched around and found a club member with a spare non-africanized mated queen. We will get her tomorrow. Meanwhile we found the queen in this hive (quite small and unmarked) and allowed her to provide pheromones for future generations in the freezer. Quite an exciting day!
Hi Rob, it arrived up here as well. I had to wear a jacket over my bee suit yesterday morning. No upset bees to speak of. Surprising because we had a lot of rain up until the night before. Someone came to pick up some bees to transfer into their box at lunchtime, I fully expected some aggression, but all was good.
here too- it’s suddenly very cold- and more like winter just arrived. After months with no rain we had a little- not enough to get deep into the soil though. Bees have quietened down. I am feeding a swarm I caught last week- quite odd to catch a swarm at this time of year - but it was a nice medium sized one.
Speaking of colder weather- and a poor year for the bees- I just got a link to this article from our Bee Society about the increasing problem of chalkbrood around Australia: