It could be quite a long job today as we now have six colonies to inspect - it used to take us over an hour just to go through them when we only had two (I can't believe that's only a few weeks ago!), so we'll have to just whizz through them this time.
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Charlotte:
This colony was artificially swarmed a little while ago and they have plenty of room -we are not expecting to find any evidence of swarming here.
A good pattern of eggs and brood here and they have started building up good stores already.
Sure enough, Charlie is still here, laying happily. Nothing to concern us in this colony so we quickly moved on to the next one:.
Beatrix:
Just like the previous colony, this queen has already been artificially swarmed so everything should be fine in here.
Just like in Charlie's colony, they have started building across the brood box but there is still plenty of room for expansion.
Sure enough, we found Bea quickly. This a relief because it shows that we did artificially swarm them correctly - there seems to be no evidence of swarming here at all now..
Swarm in Spare Nuc:
Time to look at the swarm we caught two days ago - they should have started settling into their new home.
They have already built up the foundation on a couple of frames, just on the further side.
We found the queen quickly enough - there aren't many bees here as it was just a cast swarm. A cast swarm occurs when a new queen hatches and, instead of staying in the hive and leading the colony herself, she immediately swarms from the hive, even before mating, taking all the flying bees and as much honey as they can carry. This seriously depletes the strength of an already-weakened colony and I thought I'd taken all the necessary precautions to prevent this from happening, but obviously that didn't work!
Sure enough, she's a virgin queen. As shown in the photos, her abdomen is visibly far smaller than our other two queens because, as she has not yet mated, her ovaries haven't swelled up yet. A fertile queen is an egg-laying machine; she can lay more than her whole body-weight in eggs in just one day! This young queen will need to mate in the next few days and then hopefully we will find that she is successfully laying eggs next time we check.
These are our first two nucleus hives. These have been queenless so far but we are hoping to find laying queens in them now - either one of these (or even neither of them!) could have produced the cast swarm..
N1:
The drawing pin stuck in that frame above is there to remind me which frame we left in there with a good queen cell on it...
... but looking at this frame there is no sign of the queen cell at all.
Instead there are two different queen cells, clearly ripe and ready to hatch...
... and then on another frame two more, also ready to hatch at any moment! We found a total of six ripe queen cells in this nucleus..
N2:
This colony is the exact other half of the previous N1 nucleus.
Again, the frames with queen cells was marked with drawing pins, and again, there was no sign of the cells we had left there!
Instead there were also loads of different, ripe queen cells!
This one was huge - apparently this can happen when a queen tries to hatch out but the workers won't let her - every time she nibbles her way out they just stuff a bit more food in there and seal her up again! I have no idea why they are doing this, it just seems bizarre.We counted a total of five ripe queen cells in this nucleus, also with no trace of a hatched queen.
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By a process of elimination, the swarm must have issued from this last colony, the hive we found the swarm clinging on to.
I had relocated this hive shortly before the queen was due to hatch so that she would not have any flying bees to take with her in a cast swarm but I must have moved it too soon, despite all my careful calculations.
Just like before, the frame with the queen cell was marked with a drawing pin, and just like before, there was no sign of that queen cell!
Instead there was this huge empty queen cell.
It's a very long one, like she was sealed in there well beyond her 'due date' and it is now obviously recently vacated - the jagged edge where the queen nibbled her way out is still visible. This is clearly where the swarm queen came from two days ago.
There was also this other ripe queen cell on this same frame..
... and as we checked through the brood box we found a total of seven ripe queen cells! This means that, if every hatching queen in our apiary were to produce a cast swarm (which seems quite possible now that I've found that my date calculations were incorrect) we could possibly have a total of 18 more cast swarms flying out, all within the next few days! Oh, good grief!
We managed to zip through all these inspections in record time - the whole process took us about an hour and a half - but there's obviously much more work to be done here. Time to phone up our local expert beekeeper for advice - again!
