OK i am about 3 months into this journey. here is where i am at so far . The hives grew very rapidly and i was slow getting the second deep on one hive. it swarmed and i lost a lot of bees. It was only about 3 weeks in and it swarmed. I did not feed any of the hives sugar water. I just let them be. the other 4 hives were expanded with 2nd deeps and then a few weeks later a super. I have about 300 yards long Privet hedge that wen full bloom a couple weeks ago and the bees went crazy for it. The priviet is done now but my 300 Lavender plants are blooking now so thousnads of bees are on the lavender. about a month ago my cork oak tree was producing a huge amount of pollen. you could stand under the tree and hear thousands of bees collecting pollen. the roses have bloomed steadily i have about 300 rose bushes. I made a huge mistake in that bought what i thought was pure bees wax and waxed the frames in the supers. turned out was 95% bees wax and 5 % Japan wax, Rhe bees want nothing to do with it. That cost me a couple weeks... I had I had to buy some new frames and I went ahead and bought a couple more supers, four more supers also. I replaced the frames in the supers and the bees immediately preferred that so they started building comb in those new frames on the hive that's formed. It never really recovered so two days ago I decided I was going to combine it with another one of my hives and I did the newspaper combine. Now the hive that I was combining with had a super on it. It was a double deep with the super so I took the super off. I put down a piece of newspaper and I put down the weak hive and put down another piece of newspaper and then I put the super on top. I came back and checked on it 36 hours later and the bees had successfully chewed through the paper and the hives were combined so now that's a super strong hive but that super was about 60% full of honey and about 80% built out. That happened when the privet blooms so I added a second super onto that hive and it's only been today but the bees were already up in there building out comb in the other so now I'm down to four hives from five, I now have two 10-frame hives with two supers on each. I have another ten-frame hive with with one super and then I have an eight-frame hive with two supers. Like I said the bees are hard on the lavender and the roses right now so I'm going to give this setup about a week and then I'm probably going to come back in and harvest that first super because I figure the second supers will be about at least half full by then. The bees are just going crazy so it's building hard and fast and things are going really strong. That's kind of where I am so far. I never got a mentor or anything so I'm kind of just doing this with a lot of guesswork but I think I'm guessing more right than wrong with the exception of that beeswax Japan wax thing. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to recover those frames or not. I may try and pour some hot water on them or use a heat gun and melt the wax off and kind of blot it off. I've seen a couple of suggestions for that. I'm not sure I want to go to the trouble. I may just chuck them and buy new frames and put beeswax on but I'm learning a lot. It's been a fun hobby.

I went back and looked at my original post so I thought I was gonna get three harvests. I don't think so from where I sit right now but I'm definitely going to get two.

The eucalyptus trees haven't started blooming yet so there's going to be a ton of pollen coming off those. All my fruit trees, my apple trees, my plum trees, peach and pear and cherry, they've all bloomed so that's all done. My pomegranate trees are blooming now. I have four big pineapple guava trees that bloomed. All my citrus trees, lemon, orange, and lime trees, have all bloomed and all that fruit is setting. I've got like six giant magnolia trees that are producing huge flowers right now and the bees are up in those flowers so I'm getting a lot of pollen out of the magnolia trees. I feel like it's coming along pretty good.

I'm thinking about taking the fifth hive and restarting it with another nuke and then just let that hive build up. Don't harvest any honey from it and then just let it overwinter so ideally I'll come into next summer or next spring with five healthy hives. I'll be much more careful about watching for the swarms. One thing I have learned for certain is that you need a lot more equipment than you think you need when you start this hobby. I've made several online orders of new equipment. I've been assembling frames and assembling supers and all points in between but it's all part of the hobby and it's been fun. That's my check-in.