question?

[badger]

Hi,
Thought I would ask to see what others thought?
I have a one and a half brood, overwintered.
It is not 100% full, but including stores it is prob 90%
I supered a month ago and they are filling this up.
On inspection today, I found loads of eggs/brood/lavae a few queen cups but one capped queen cell, just off centre of the middle frame in the top half brood.
I did not have a long time to inspect due to weather so did not find the queen, but I was happy with the ammount of eggs found.
The question is why is there just one capped cell ?
My thoughts are I should make a Nuc up removing the said frame with a couple of other filled frames ?
Your thoughts please ?
Regards Badger

 

[drstitson]

supersedure?

 

[badger]

Thank you Drstitson,
What puzzled me was the one capped cell ?
What would you do now ?
Regards Badger

 

[drstitson]

2 choices:

1. leave them to it.

2. take frame with cell, enough bees and some stores into a nuc (or mating nuc)

depends on your attitude to original queen. how old is she?

in latter case they are likely to keep superseding (if i recall in snelgrove he refers to a case where 60 or so cells were removed from a colony like this over a season).

if it were me and the colony otherwise is going good guns i'd stick the cell in a mating nuc (or make up a proper nuc). maybe not good weather for this one to mate BUT maybe or maybe next time.

 

[badger]

I re queened this hive last year.
I was puzzled with just the one capped cell, I did think that maybe she made a mistake and laid an egg in a cup by mistake.
Cheers