Today was difficult. I had committed to send a blue dot breeder queen to Mike Palmer about a month ago. I described the queen's traits of highly mite resistant, non-swarming, gentle, and good honey production for 2 years.
I monitored this queen weekly since early spring. A month ago, the bees were on the verge of superseding her so I moved her to a nucleus with 3 frame of bees. She made it just fine in the nuc maintaining 2 frames of brood. I pulled a frame of eggs and larvae to get cells built last week verifying that she was still on the job.
Yesterday was the rubber hits the road moment so I prepared a box, queen cage, candy, and went to the hive to pull the queen. She was nowhere to be found. I did a careful search then and found a virgin queen walking around on the comb. The blue dot queen was nowhere to be found.
So today I called Mike and told him the queen I had promised was MIA.
The only good news is that I already have half a dozen mated queens raised from her and I will get perhaps a dozen more from the frame I put in the cell builder. Perhaps next year I will have a good enough breeder for some swapping.