ConfusedPeter.com!

Well queen no 63 is out of her travelling cage, but doesn't look like she's a prospective mum yet! In fact I'm seriously confused, when I last looked when I put her in there were no larvae or brood, (wax capped larvae, bees in the making), now there is larvae and drone brood, (male bees), definitely nowhere near enough time for her to lay eggs that develop that much!

So maybe there is a drone laying queen or bee in there somewhere! Hopefully they have had a fight and the drone layer is now history! So next time I look I need to see serious amount of larvae and worker bee brood, without that the colony is doomed to fail, it's late in the season and they need bee numbers up high.

Just to confuse me more I decided to destroy all the old empty queen bee cells, only to find two larvae developing in them! Won't be developing now!

The bee world is complicated, I wonder what is going through their minds? Who really knows, they've been here for 60 million years so they must know what they are doing, guess need to sit back and trust nature.

Come on girls.

Royal Femail delivery

Well queenie arrived in CityWest Home's reception this morning, care of Royal Femail, got a call, your bees are here, they are buzzing.

It then took thirty minutes to get back to desk, think this must have been one of most popular deliveries to the office, so now the proud owner of a new queen, No 63, and a small entourage of workers to keep her company.

Best name, ok only name, Beeyonce! :-), 1st Prize a jar of honey, the downside it won't be until August 2013! :-(

They spent rest of day sitting in my filing tray, then into my pocket for train journey home. Suited up I had to get the six workers out of the queen travelling cage so that just she went into the hive in it. She then will stay in it until the worker bees in the hive have eaten their way past a barrier of food, by which time they should have accepted her smell and won't kill her by suffocation!

So now will have to wait a week to see if they accept her and she has started laying eggs, it's a race against time now, she has to lay a lot of eggs so that the colony can build up strength for the long winter ahead. Seems strange to talk about winter when we haven't had a summer yet! But for bees August is honey harvesting time and then they have to start getting ready to survive winter, the queen will stop laying in September, so for this colony it will be touch and go this winter! Fingers crossed, have given them an outside chance with this new queen.

In hive ready for her new team to eat their way in to rescue her