Sunday 25th April
I'm still concerned about losing our strong colony through swarming, just like this time last year.
All the textbooks say that one inspection a week is adequate during swarming season because it takes 8-9 days for the colony to go from no presence of swarm cells at all, to building one up to a viable queen cell, then sealing it up and swarming away. However, this is working under the assumption that the beekeeper is infallible and spots every single tiny swarm cell in the inspection, even with thousands of bees about - I'm just not that confident that we didn't miss one!
If we did miss just one swarm cell on Saturday (it would have been a tiny one, with the new egg just put in it, because we did look very thoroughly) then it's possible that it could contain a viable larva two days later (Monday), and the queen cell would be sealed five days after that (Saturday). This action of sealing the queen cell is the trigger to start a swarm so it's possible (highly unlikely, but possible) that my healthy colony could swarm on Saturday morning while I'm at work and unable to return until that evening!
The more I think about it, the more this seems to be just completely inevitable, knowing our luck with the bees so far! I'd be so gutted if we lose our strong colony to be left with two weak ones, one of them crippled by varroa infestation!
I'll leave it to Mother Nature to decide it for me - if the weather's decent enough for us to do an inspection on Wednesday afternoon I'll close the shop early and check the colony; if the weather's poor I'll just keep my fingers crossed instead...!
