I added a new super on top today because there seemed to be very little spare room inside. I swapped several of the frames over in each super so both of them have some full and some empty frames. This should encourage them to fill the empty ones more quickly.
As usual, they've filled up any spaces they can with brace comb so I scraped it all off as normal. I need to build myself a wax melter soon so I can start saving all this surplus wax rather than just dispose of it. They're very expensive to buy but I'm sure I can make a basic solar-powered one quite quickly.
There are two queen cups here, a bit of practising for the swarming season. I checked they had no eggs inside - if a worker had actually transferred an egg in there it would show that they're getting pretty serious about swarming. Finding an actual larva in one means they will (almost definitely) swarm within the next 5 - 7 days so it's vital to check every single one of these I find, just in case.The swarming instinct is practically unavoidable as it is the bees' natural method of reproducing - the whole colony splits in two, one half leaving with the old queen, the other half staying behind to raise a new queen. Of course I don't want to lose half my bees and a good queen so I'm planning on attempting an 'artificial swarm' when the time is right - it's a method of fooling the bees into believing that they have swarmed, and involves manually dividing the colony.
The presence of drone cells on the bottom of the frame above is a good sign - the queen actually chooses the gender of the bee as she lays the egg by either fertilising it as is laid to create a female, or laying an infertile egg to create a male - it sounds like the maddest science fiction but it's absolutely true!She will usually only lay drone eggs when the colony is strong enough to keep them - drones are notoriously hungry and lazy. They do no work whatsoever, not even guard duties [they have no stinger so can be handled without any danger at all] - their only purpose in life is to find a virgin queen, mate with her, then die immediately after. Until that happens they just lounge around looking impressive!
Judging by how many drone cells have been built here I think the colony can probably afford to lose a few! Leaving a portion of drone brood like this for a while is a good idea because varroa mites prefer drone cells to breed in. Once these cells are sealed I can just slice them all off and dispose of them. It means losing a large number of [mostly useless] drones and hopefully an even larger number of varroa mites.
We've had no luck spotting our queen Amidala yet. This seems like an impossible task right now but we do need to find her before attempting the artificial swarm - we're hopeful that we've got several more weeks before we need to worry about that though.
