Last week I made a classic error of a complete amateur (which, to be fair, I am!) by not recognising the signs that our colony was actually just about to swarm! I did of course notice that there was a massive amount of bees in the hive when they should have been out foraging on a lovely sunny day - it turns out that they weren't out foraging because they were all there in front of us, busy packing their bags ready to swarm away from the hive! As shown here, we had quite a surprise this week to find that most of our bees (and more importantly, the queen too) have just vanished!
Last week:
This week:
It seems that, probably on Thursday, approximately 70% of the bees swarmed out of the hive with the queen, taking about 30% of the honey reserves with them. I've always read that a swarm leaves with 50% of the bees and 50% of the honey, but maybe that's just an estimate, depending on the local conditions.We've searched all the barns, attics, chimney pots, sheds, trees, even the empty owl-box in the field nearby but there's no trace of them.
I thought I'd cut off all the queen cells last week, as I have been doing every week as a routine, but this was not enough to put them off - it seems they just swarmed anyway!
What I should have done is recognised that the colony was on the verge of swarming and split them straight away, even without finding the queen. Doing an artificial swarm without finding the queen is possible, it just takes much longer.
I now have only one massively smaller colony with much smaller food stores and no queen - a really huge setback to our year. This colony will be able to raise a new queen because Amidala left them with enough provisions to survive and they have already started growing a new queen to replace her.
There are three long queen cells hanging on the bottom of this frame, each containing a larva in royal jelly. This is the last chance for this colony to survive as a queen can only be raised from eggs less than 3 days old and there are no more of these left in the hive now.We checked every frame, handling them extremely gently so as not to damage any precious queen cells, and found a total of 7 viable queen larvae. The colony will only tolerate one queen - they'll either destroy any surplus queen cells before the queen hatches or otherwise the first queen to hatch will immediately search the whole hive and destroy every other developing queen herself by ripping a hole in the side and stinging the pupa before it emerges. If two queens hatch at the same time (which is quite possible as these eggs would be very nearly the same age) they would meet and fight to the death, with worker bees helping by choosing which queen to defend.
Another scenario which is quite possible is that one, two, three or even more queens could swarm as soon as they hatch, each one taking another 50% of the bees and stores with them [this is known as a 'cast']. This would be certain disaster for the colony and that's why I have to select what I consider to be the 'best' (?!?) queen cell and destroy all the others myself.
All hopes for this colony then rest on this queen. She quickly learns her flying and navigational skills (not wasting time doing all those days of cleaning duties like the other bees do), then we'll be hoping for a fine spell of weather because she only mates while in flight and is only fertile for about five days of her entire five year lifespan!
This is a staggering amount to expect of one bee (especially one that right now looks like nothing more than a curled up grub in a pool of white goo!)
