A week has passed since we last looked in this hive (which has shown a worryingly high level of varroa infestation) and the first part of the varroa treatment should be completed.
Despite the varroa, the general health of the hive has been good so far and the varroa floor tray shows that a large quantity of the infestation has now been removed. 
The early signs were good - plenty of healthy activity in the hive and this brood frame at the end shown above clearly contains a good quantity of sealed honey.
This frame is part of my non-chemical varroa treatment plan - it is actually a shallow frame, designed to fit in the super, which has been placed in between the deeper brood frames. The bees have built up the large space at the bottom of the frame with a huge section of drone comb.This is known as 'bait comb' - I specifically encourage the bees to build it, knowing that varroa mites prefer to lay eggs in drone comb if it is available. [Statistically, up to 2 varroa mites can emerge from a worker cell, whereas up to 4 can emerge from a drone cell, due to the longer development time. Up to 10 mites can be in a cell, parasitically feeding on the pupa, but only fully-grown mites can survive when the bee actually hatches out.]
Once this bait comb is sealed I can remove and destroy the whole section, along with all the mites breeding inside.
We weren't expecting to find anything like this in this hive...
... moving the bees out of the way shows two queen cells, one of them containing a queen larva in royal jelly - this means I need to artificially swarm this colony straight away! This is something of a problem because I'm completely unprepared - I have the nucs ready (I finished building the last one just this afternoon outside the shop) but I haven't knocked together the empty brood frames yet! It'll only take me less than an hour to do but we don't have time today.All we can do now is go through the rest of the brood, quickly marking frames with viable queen cells on so that we can speedily create an artificial swarm tomorrow - hopefully before any queen cells are sealed over, giving the colony the green light to swarm immediately!
Three more queen cells on this frame, one of them very large with a bee reaching in to feed it with more royal jelly.
Yet another large queen cell, on the far left here.
I tried to get a good shot of the larva inside but it was hard to manage a focused shot without bees wandering in the way!
I think this one is the best shot I could manage, shame about the blurry bee in front though.
We found 6 queen cells with actual larvae in, not just eggs, and clearly marked the three frames we found them on with drawing pins.We closed up, planning to return tomorrow with all we need to create yet another artificial swarm!
It's all a bit sudden and not exactly what we were planning for our Bank Holiday weekend, but great news with regards to the varroa problem - I should be able to knock that out the same way as with the other colony, with a bit of luck.
