Perils of Queen Rearing
I inspected my mini-nucs today, two days after they went to the mating site and 3 days after the queens emerged.
I went through them all and checked the queens had emerged from their cells and removed the remains of the cells. All went fine but one cell appeared still sealed. I removed it anyway and was preparing to unit the mini-nuc with another, assuming the queen had not emerged, but curiosity got the better of me and I opened up the sealed queen cell - to find a dead worker entombed in there. I have read about this but not seen it before. Some hapless worker had gone in for a sniff around and been walled in by her mates. Charming. A lesson learned - the cell looked very normal but slightly shorter than expected, which was perhaps the only clue. The original queen cells were all quite long but this one when I first saw it was short but the end was very well closed - you couldn't see the join, so to speak.
I also found them all without food of any sort. I had given them a commercial beefood containing pollen but I hadn't a lot at the time so split 1kg amongst 9 mini-nucs. This turned out to be far too little, they had all scoffed the lot in 7 days and were a bit nippy too, so I guess they were hungry and more than a bit upset at me. I had forgotton to bring more food and for a moment I was tempted to leave them be for another day and visit them again tomorrow but then I realised why so few bees were flying from the mini-nucs. These were all young bees harvested from brood frames so I suspect most of them couldn't fly and therefore the little colonies had few foragers to collect their own food. I made the one hour round trip journey home and came back with 2 kg of bee food and distributed that amongst them.
Lssons learned were don't assume a sealed queen cell has failed, the bees may have repaired it and always ensure mini-nucs have food, at least until they have a reasonable amount of foragers but even then their stores are very limited so they can't survive long in bad weather if they don't have additional supplements from the beekeeper.