Regicide

Well it looks like the I have a queen in the main hive, I can only assume that the small queen I have just seen has killed off the competition. Mind you she is very small, I wonder will she be up to the challenge of keeping a colony of 40,000 bees happy?

It maybe that she is still a virgin queen and is yet to make her mating flight, it's very possible because there is no sign of eggs or larvae and the few capped brood that remain must be the last of her mothers brood in the colony?

Thinking about it logically she can't be too big otherwise she won't be able to fly, once she has had her fun on the wing the workers will fatten her up. I hope so anyway, she was hard to spot.

Now I will wait to see if eggs, larvae and new brood appear before I sell the nuc to a friend of a beekeeping colleague at work.

It's a big relief finding the queen, this beekeeping can be quite stressful! :-)

Empty Queen cells, but.......

.......... no sign of any new queen in the main hive! Hope she was just hiding somewhere, however I did see a small amount of larvae on one frame and theory has it that because the old queen as removed 13 days ago they might be to do with a new queen, however as the queen cells were capped 13 days ago I have no idea when the queen would have hatched and then a week later made her mating flight, all sounds a bit improbable to me!

Will have to wait until next time to see if there is a queen in there, if not then guess it will be the quickest a colony had been reunited with the old queen they were trying to get rid of, failing that I need to buy a queen on the internet and get it posted a bit quick!

On the plus side the old queen seems very happy in the nucleus box and no signs of any queen cells in there.

Queen cell cull

I made my quick call to Mike from Beesandbeans to see if I had made the right decisions, seems almost got it right, but I had left too many queen cells in the old hive.

So tonight ably assisted by Russ we got rid of all but two queen cells, the first queen to hatch usually will kill the other one, failing that they wll fight it out, winner takes the colony.

The photo shows couple of queen cells and Russ getting himself mentally prepared :-).

Russ's verdict - "It's good, weird that they are all just flying around us"

PS That's Joe hard at work in the background cooking dinner, he choose that over helping with the bees!

Queen cell, and another and another.........

I opened the hive today, not really knowing what I would find.

The Queen cups I had seen on the last inspection were now fully fledged queen cells, with more on the way, there must have been over a dozen of them!

Fortunately I had found the queen on the super frame for drone culling, so placed that frame into my nuc box along with the only three frames that had no queen cells on, making up the remainder of the nuc with some new brood frames.

These lady bees can be quite brutal, the queen is less than a year old and already they want her out!

So now in theory I will have two hives, so where do I put the second one? Dad's seems the ideal solution, popped down to see him and agree where to put the hive. Eileen casually mentions that she is allergic to wasp stings, the next one might kill her! So not a good idea to put the hive at dads, will have to put my thinking cap on.

I was a bit worried that I might not have dealt with the queen cells correctly so put a call out to Mike of Beesnbeans, it seems I have done ok with the exception of leaving too many queen cells in the original hive. So must get back in there and destroy all but two of the queen cells.

Exciting stuff, I wonder if I will get to see the virgin queen's flight? Or will I end up with no bees at all!