4pm - calm and sunny, perfect weather for opening up the hive again.
Our main aim today was to find the queen and mark her so that she'd be easier to spot another time, should we need to find her.
It's a good idea to do this as soon as possible because with every week that passes there will be hundreds more bees each time as more and more bees hatch out.
We went through every single frame, trying to spot how recently the queen was on it, by examining the size of the larvae to see how recently the eggs have been laid. We found a frame with eggs less than one day old (they are the same shape as but about a quarter of the size of a small grain of rice and stand up straight on their tip end at the bottom of the cell) but we couldn't spot her.
However, the pattern of the developing brood is ideal (that's the cells in the centre of this frame, where the developing larvae are old enough to be sealed away with wax until they are old enough to nibble their own way out. When a bee hatches the first thing it will do is go to the nearby honey stores - visible here sealed with paler wax all around the brood - and then return to their cell and clean it out, ready for the next egg to arrive! The hive-cleaning job is what all female bees (except the queen) do for the first few days until they are ready to graduate to the next skill level!As the bees were very calm still we went through every frame once more trying to find her but then had to give up. It's a bit frustrating, especially knowing that it'll be even harder to spot her next time we look, but at least finding day-old eggs proves that she is definitely there and didn't get lost during the transfer!
