It's amazing how quickly you get attached to your bee colony, and your queen. After having our swarm for around 4 weeks, we made our inspection 14 days ago. And there were no eggs. Very small larvae, but no visible eggs.
So our queen had stopped laying, or she had left. We felt so disappointed and having inspected the number of bees we are fairly confident she had left.
A week later, we had 8 queen cells. And life was complicated. The advice we got was to artificial swarm (which seemed complicated for a new beekeeper), knock the queen cells down to 2-3, or leave the bees to sort themselves out. It's not so easy without experience to understand which were the top 2-3 queen cells. After 24 hours deliberation we decided that the bees know best and left them to it.
What a long week as we waited. And yesterday we inspected. We were delighted to find the first queen cell was open - like an open submarine hatch!
We went through the rest of the frames to find the other queen cells still intact. But imagine my delight, when we saw the queen. (photo attached) She's thin, very thin. Apparently she's either still a virgin, possibly preparing to mate or to swarm. Or she's mated and in the next week (or so) she will be fed, and fed, until she is laying.
We'll wait and see.
So our queen had stopped laying, or she had left. We felt so disappointed and having inspected the number of bees we are fairly confident she had left.
A week later, we had 8 queen cells. And life was complicated. The advice we got was to artificial swarm (which seemed complicated for a new beekeeper), knock the queen cells down to 2-3, or leave the bees to sort themselves out. It's not so easy without experience to understand which were the top 2-3 queen cells. After 24 hours deliberation we decided that the bees know best and left them to it.
What a long week as we waited. And yesterday we inspected. We were delighted to find the first queen cell was open - like an open submarine hatch!
We went through the rest of the frames to find the other queen cells still intact. But imagine my delight, when we saw the queen. (photo attached) She's thin, very thin. Apparently she's either still a virgin, possibly preparing to mate or to swarm. Or she's mated and in the next week (or so) she will be fed, and fed, until she is laying.
We'll wait and see.
