Laying Queens

Sunday 31st May
It's been hard to leave the colonies untouched for so long but the queens have to be left undisturbed for at least three weeks. We've had some perfect weather for them to perform their mating flights recently so hopefully they should be busy laying eggs now.
.
First Hive:
Good sign here in the brood frames - loads of pollen, fabulous colours this time of year too. Bees need the high-protein pollen (which has a proportinally higher protein value than beef) to feed the brood. Lots of pollen means they're preparing for lots of brood, I hope.
Sure enough, here on the next frame, a perfect comb filled with freshly-laid eggs. A closer view here:
Each cell has one tiny egg standing up in it. They're not easy to see unless the light and angle are just right. There's no way of knowing if these eggs are fertile yet (infertile eggs produce drones, the male bees; an egg has to be fertilised to be female) so there's nothing more to look for in this hive.
.
Second Hive:
The bees were noticeably calmer in this hive, very relaxed and completely ignoring us.
It was a real surprise to see this on the frame - three cells sealed already, which means the egg must have been laid in it about a week ago!
Sure enough, these cells are surrounded by well-developed larvae and they're definitely female worker brood from fertile eggs too (drone cells are much larger and stick up more). This is just exactly what we have been hoping for. We were ready to close up again but just had a quick scan through the rest of the frames to see if there was anything unusual.
The very next frame had the queen on it. As she is a proven fertile queen we decided to take the opportunity to mark her. She was fast but I managed to get the queen cage over her. I was holding her down (gently, of course!) but she squiggled around so much that the tiny dab of paint smudged all over her!
I quickly let her go before the paint had a chance to dry - she had paint all over her eyes and wings too. This is something the books say you must NEVER do, especially dangerous if it obstructs any tiny breathing holes in her abdomen. It will be so awful if I've just killed her by paint blob. I hope they'll be able to clean the paint off her ok, it is that non-toxic bee paint (smells like poster paint) so it may come off easily - I won't know what damage I've done now for another week at least!

Looking for Two Queens

Sunday 10th May

All has been a bit unsettled around here this last fortnight. The weather's not been great and the bees' temper has been atrocious. They keep chasing after us when we're nowhere near the hives - I came home from work and was stung on the face while walking from the van to the house - about 200 yards away from the hives, with two hedges and several trees between me and them!
I was carrying a tray of plants at the time so couldn't dance around swatting crazily like I would have liked to (the kids and wife were watching too, so I had to force myself to keep cool!) but that was a big mistake. It meant that I got a full dose of venom right into my forehead. Normally you should scrape out the stinger straight away as it keeps pumping more in after the bee dies (it's 'heart' is ripped from its body and is used to pump the venom sac - fascinating but agonising!). My delay in getting the stinger out meant that within 6 hours my whole face had swelled up like a balloon. It wasn't painful but itchy and a huge nuisance when my eyelids swelled shut!

Anyway, the swelling went down fast and we've been hiding inside all week. I don't know why the bees have suddenly become so aggressive but we're really hoping they'll calm down when the queens hatch.
All seemed to be just as normal near the hives today. There have been no instances of bees chasing anybody for the last few days and they didn't seem that bothered to see us.
.
First Hive Plenty of food reserves here in the supers - one super is completely full and the other has still some left. That's not really surprising as this is now a large amount of stores for such a small colony.
The queen cell I'd left in this hive is visible at the bottom of this frame, but it doesn't look at all like I was expecting it to.
Instead of a nibbled-out rough edge at the bottom where the queen should have chewed her way out, it looks all smooth and rounded - like it was never sealed in the first place.
I was just starting to have a little panic when I spotted this in the corner of the same frame - a recently-vacated queen cell! I'm sure there wasn't a queen cell here at all when I put the frame in - we were checking so carefully.
However, here it is with the loose flap still actually attached - the queen must have hatched literally within the last few minutes! At this point my wife said, "do you hear that noise? Like a chirping sound - it's coming from that frame."
... and here she is - a brand new virgin queen! The sound she was making is called 'piping'. Apparently all queens make this sound all the time, usually too quietly for humans to hear but much louder when they are distressed or calling out for rival queens to fight. The combination of seeing the bright daylight within moments of hatching and also needing to check that there weren't any rival queens to battle probably meant that no queen bee has ever shrieked louder!
Not wanting to distress her any further we gently closed up the hive and moved on to the next one.
.
Second Hive: Very similar situation with the stores here - they've used some of the stores but not much.
Just like in the first hive - the healthy queen cell I carefully selected two weeks age is visible here on the bottom of the frame...
... and just like in the other hive, the hole is all rounded, not nibbled at all - for some reason it seems the two larvae I selected for stardom were actually not fit for purpose!
Sure enough, just like in the other hive, we quickly found this cluster of three queen cells! If you look really closely at this photo there are two remarkable things to spot:
One of the queen cells has the jagged edge like something has hatched out very recently, and just a few inches to the left...
... is the new virgin queen, again just moments from hatching out!

I obviously made some huge mistakes two weeks ago. Firstly I incorrectly estimated when the swarm had departed - for the workers to have been able to raise new queen cells there must have been very recently-laid eggs on the frames. The swarm must have departed on Friday or even Saturday, just one day before we made the divide! Secondly I must have somehow damaged the queen larvae I wanted to save. To make it even worse, I'd also intentionally destroyed all the other queen cells!

As overjoyed as I am that we now have two colonies with queens now, I know that this is actually no thanks to me and my apparently useless efforts - what I was doing was actually working against the bees!

Now we're going to leave both colonies well alone for three whole weeks so that the queens have time to grow and mature, then venture out to mate. We'll be hoping for good weather now and maybe at the end of the month we'll find some eggs in these cells.

Development of Queen Larvae

Saturday 2nd May

The unsealed queen cells I left in the hives will be closed up by the workers on the eggs' ninth day since being laid. Inside this sealed cell the larva pupates like a caterpillar in a cocoon and the adult queen hatches out on the sixteenth day.

This is a much shorter development time than any other bee in the colony because of her luxury diet - she is fed nothing except for pure royal jelly for the whole first nine days, whereas workers and drones only receive this for the first three days.

Judging by the size of the larvae I left in the hives on Sunday, I think they were probably about six days old. If this is the case then the cells will have been sealed shut on Wednesday and the queens should hatch out next Wednesday.

I'll allow a few extra days in case I estimated the larvae's age incorrectly but if we can check them on Sunday 10th May we will be hoping to find two newly-hatched queen bees...