Son and his mate came to help at the wasteground tonight, because I relalised that I could end up in hospital trying to replace those capped supers at eye level.
I've put on the Porter bee escapes to clear 3 capped supers because although I would rather extract in one go, I also don't want to not be able to work the hives on my own.
I had one of those, "I'm losing the plot" moments today. Last week there was no sign of my fancy clipped queen (you know the one from the breeder queen). Worse than that the hive was full of queen cells. No eggs or young larvae. Y'know I took that as a sign that they had killed Mrs new Fancy queen. I destroyed all the QCs and introduced another clipped mongrel queen. Today the cage was empty and the mongrel was free. Get this... today I was happy.... eggs and larvae, AND the original Mrs Fancy was there too!!!! I wonder where she has been?
The old favourite queen who was dragging her leg after I remarked her last week , is fine and has been laying well, so that worked out too.
I've put on the Porter bee escapes to clear 3 capped supers because although I would rather extract in one go, I also don't want to not be able to work the hives on my own.
I had one of those, "I'm losing the plot" moments today. Last week there was no sign of my fancy clipped queen (you know the one from the breeder queen). Worse than that the hive was full of queen cells. No eggs or young larvae. Y'know I took that as a sign that they had killed Mrs new Fancy queen. I destroyed all the QCs and introduced another clipped mongrel queen. Today the cage was empty and the mongrel was free. Get this... today I was happy.... eggs and larvae, AND the original Mrs Fancy was there too!!!! I wonder where she has been?
The old favourite queen who was dragging her leg after I remarked her last week , is fine and has been laying well, so that worked out too.
