25 Nicot cells (from my 2015 Blue Buckfast queen) placed in cell raisers today. Last batch a total dud due to rogue queen in cell raiser
If they all emerge, I will be incapable of housing them...but I have a cunning plan...
Got a phone call from my lady friend today that one of the hives has swarmed, the picture below is the swarm picture i was sent.
I instructed her what to do which she did brilliantly but when i arrived the bees had left the building..
I did not plan on going through the colonies today as Saturday was my next due date, however i wanted to see which one had done the dirty on me.
The suspect colony still had the marked clipped Queen and the one queen cell, another had no queen cells but a dark virgin running around somewhere.
The third one had one open Emerged Queen cell that i had left on my last visit, the marked clipped queen was nowhere to be seen, Virgin massacre i presume, anyway i decided to go through the hive and i found and destroyed every other Queen cell that i found (not many but there you go).
I had not seen the Virgin Queen while doing this but when i got to the tenth frame she ran like a greyhound onto the top bar and took flight, i caught her in my hand and put her back on the top bars, she ran and took flight again, i knocked her back down and covered her with my hand, one second later she was on the back of my hand and took flight yet again, straight towards the sky.
So basically i now have a Queenless colony with no chance of making a new Queen unless she decides to come back home.
I love them and hate them at the moment..
Went into two colonies to remove the tabs from the cages being used to introduce two bought in queens (first time I've ever bought queens).
First hive - which had a single frame of brood and the flying bees from a split at the weekend looked fine. Knocked down a couple of feeble looking queen cells from the brood frame, took the tab off and left a generally good natured colony to their own devices.
Second hive - which was from a split three weeks ago and which had no sign of a queen at the weekend, the bees were merrily fanning around the cage and looked happy, so I took the tab off and returned the cage to its original location. Thinking of a comment on this forum recently, which said "it's unusual for a hive to end up queenless, unless it's through the actions of the beekeeper", I had a quick check of a couple of frames in the centre of the hive. Lo and behold, eggs. Hundreds and hundreds of bloody eggs! Normally I would be delighted to see a colony successfully requeened itself, but this time I was less pleased.
Fortunately I also had a queenless nuc available, from a split at the weekend, so I popped the queen cage in there after knocking down all the queen cells. Fingers crossed they like her
Didn't get any? Rained through the night and early morning here, along with winds that wrecked my lupin.
Well done on the swarm .... and I thought you were getting numbers down
Beefriendly;632234Nice roof bricks BTW...[/QUOTE said:
