This last nuc proved to be a bit of a surprise today - instead of a weak colony with no brood, trying to raise a new queen, I found this instead:
Three of the five frames inside have loads of sealed brood and the other two are full of stores! Apparently, what I read as the classic signs of a laying worker (patchy, badly positioned eggs) are also the signs of a newly-mated queen just coming in to lay for the first time ever. She must have just returned from her mating flight last week and began to lay her first eggs. She was just trying to get the hang of it, making a few mistakes of course, and then I came along and chucked her outside again, along with all the other bees!
Of course, there was no harm done - she just flew straight back with the other bees and carried on laying again. Judging by the excellent state of the brood here, it may have been just the perfect kick-start she needed to get it right!
Of course this nuc is now suddenly fit for rehoming elsewhere, with a laying queen and three frames of brood. It has had an extra boost because of the frame of emerging brood I added last week. Completely beyond expectations, it will actually need to be installed in a full hive before much longer! We found the queen quickly on this frame above so we could mark her for a new beekeeper.
She's a very long and slender one, and a real fast-mover too! Thankfully she was already located on one of the end frames, full of stores and no brood, so there was no risk of damaging larvae by using the press-in cage.
Once she was securely held in place, I dabbed a small amount of blue paint on her back, christening her 'Blue 3'. After a short while it had dried and she was free to leave again.
She'll be much easier for the new beekeeper to find from now on - I really wish our own queen had been marked so clearly in our first year, it would have made those inspections far quicker for us [but it does mean we've become pretty fast at finding an unmarked queen - usually!].
This nuc is now in a fit state for rehoming. I'll telephone the beekeeper soon and arrange to deliver it over the weekend. This relocation is going to be a bit experimental because this colony will actually only be moved about a mile and a half, as the bee flies, although it is a long journey by road, crossing over the river nearby. This means that there is a risk of a large number of foragers returning to this site, because of the bees' precise navigational skills. I originally said that I wouldn't be able to supply any bees to them because they were so close, but having researched it a bit more, I'm willing to try it as an experiment. I expect that the worst that can happen is that I have a large number of bees return to an empty nuc on this site, and then I can try just driving them back over there to the new apiary each evening until it works. Realistically, this seems very unlikely to be necessary at all, though.
