To be honest with you subbuteo, i doubt there were many in there.
The process with this hive has many factors, i wont go into the whole thing now, but basically the bottom box is a jumbo, the next brood box is a std, and they had filled the whole Std Brood box with stores, pretty much all the frames.
So i swapped 3 frames of stores for 3 frames of brood from another hive, as i need this box for a new queen coming this weekend, i wanted them to move the stores up into the supers, and keep the queen resident to lay in the box.
The top brood will be moved to a new site and a new queen introduced, the Jumbo Brood will be split into two, one with original queen minus any queen cells, and foragers, and the other with Sealed Cells.
At the time of manipulating most drones were downstairs, so i dont expect many to be affected. there may be some casualties but there is so much going on in this hive, and with work, my priority was to keep them there till i can get up to do the split this friday.
In a perfect world i should have split last saturday.
Just opened one, apologies for the blur but i was in a hurry, but you can see that the below does not apply (sadly)
If one of the Queen cells is cut open and found to extend back to the mid-rib, retaining the origional base of a worker cell, one may be sure that is is not a cell built for swarming."
