Advice for Newbie Please!

[plumberman]

Got nucleus at beginning of June, and has been going great guns, to the point that I eventually had 3 supers on - third one they only started to draw slightly, so I removed that about a week ago.

Looked through them today, and have found 2 queen cells - with larvae and royal jelly.

Queen is present, and there are lots of cells with eggs present.

Rather rashly, I removed one queen cell, and then decided that I had better think about this a little more deeply.

My real big problem is that I am off on Hols for 10 days as of Thursday, and had assumed(?) that swarming problems would be minimal!!!

My guess is that this is more likely to be supercedure ( queen is from last year) but would be grateful for any advice from you knowledgeable people out there as to the best course of action.

Cheers

 

[Finman]

.
Clip the wing of old queen and put the queen cell frame over the excluder so the new queen cannot go out.

If they intend to swarm, the old queen will disaper and bees come back.

 

[anwe]

Make a small nuc with the sealed q cell shake in plenty of young bees if its to be kept in the same apiary as most will fly back to the original site.that way if the older Quen is failing you have a potetial replacement on hand.

 

[jon]

The problem is that he is on a 10 day holiday and a queen cell gets capped at 8 days so if they make another one he could lose a swarm unless the queen is clipped as Finman suggested.