Inspected my home colonies today. I think they're trying to wind me up. If so they're quite possibly succeeding
The colony that is on wild comb in a double brood has finally moved up into the box of frames I put on top. But only to use it for storing honey. I've put a QX underneath and I'll have to work out how to extract it in the Autumn.
I'd not put a couple of frames back into a box I collected a swarm in because I couldn't do it without risking injuring/killing bees, and obviously they'd started building comb off the (temporary, because at the time I'd run out) crown board rather than the frames. That all collapsed into the bottom of the hive when I took the crown board off causing who knows what damage. Entirely my fault and I'm really, really quite pissed off at myself about that one. I'd left the frames under the roof and just completely forgot about them. I should have brought them into the house or something so I'd at least have seen them and remembered to go back and put them in.
A couple of colonies (swarms from a few weeks back) look to be hopelessly queenless for reasons that aren't at all clear to me. Mating failures perhaps? They're bringing in nectar and pollen and building comb but there's no sign of a laying queen when there really ought to be by now.
Another colony seems to have queen cells every time I look in it. It's teeming with bees, but no sign of any eggs and hasn't (to my knowledge) swarmed recently, but there were six sealed QCs across three frames. One was even built on the face of the comb over the top of another. I knocked them down to one per frame and donated two of them to the two colonies that appear to be without a queen. They can sort themselves out from there, or I will.
The last one I inspected was a swarm that arrived on 14th May. I first inspected them on 24th May. I felt ten days was enough time for them to settle down. I saw the queen and marked her, saw eggs present and left them to it without checking every frame. Today there is sealed brood, no eggs and half a dozen sealed queen cells. Two possible explanations occur to me. The first is that they didn't like me marking her and killed her off, raising EQCs from larvae they already head, but my favoured one (because some of the QCs are hanging off the bottom of the comb outside the main brood area) is that they swarmed again on 24th and were in fact the swarm that I caught that evening. If that happened on day ten then they're due to emerge tomorrow so I guess I'd better go out there and do something about it sharpish (I left them at the time because I didn't know what the dates were). Sadly, if that's correct then I may well have just dumped a load of comb and nectar on the queen's head, because that swarm was the one with the missing frames. I might move one of the frames with QCs into a dummied-down brood box (I have no nucs left) and donate some house bees from another colony. Why they'd have been swarming again though I have no idea.
Another I looked at and just couldn't work out what was going on, but my notes are a bit stream-of-consciousness and I need to go back through them to try to rationalise what I was actually looking at.
James
) neglected to inspect a hive for 10 days recently. We checked it 3 days ago and no sign of the queen or eggs but 3 unsealed QC’s. checked it again today and lots of QC’s on the frames that had small larvae. Possible supersedure but probably swarmed. Kept 2 QC’s and will double check in couple of days that they haven’t made any more and reduce to one. Is there any issue in this situation with making them hopelessly queenless and introducing a new queen rather than waiting for a new queen to emerge and mate?
