Having telephoned an expert for advice I came straight back out to remove all the surplus queen cells from each colony. I need to leave only the one largest and healthiest-loooking cell so that there is no risk of her producing a cast swarm upon hatching, like the last one did.
As soon as I lifted the first marked frame out with a queen cell I noticed something very exciting - the queen was actually hatching out before my eyes!
This cell was the one shown still sealed over just one hour ago - the one on the same frame as the empty cell which produced the cast swarm. I couldn't get a good photo of her hatching out and as I rested the corner of the frame down to try to take a better photo she ran off the side of it!
By pure luck, I caught a glimpse of where she had run to - she'd scooted straight into the corner of the brood box and I managed to take a couple of pictures of her.
Surprisingly, she isn't remotely 'fluffy' like the worker bees usually are when they have just hatched [see an example here], though she is clearly much larger than the other bees already.
She didn't hang about for long and I didn't want to distress her so I just watched her scurry off down into the brood box.
At least I now know for sure that this colony has a live queen in it - I quickly worked my way through every other frame removing every single queen cell on it.
I saved them all in a tub to have a closer look at later, though it was clear that some of them were actually empty! It just shows that it's impossible to tell from looking at it just what is really inside.
I need to do exactly the same in both the nucs now - this one first.
Having removed every inferior-looking cell, these two looked the 'best' to me, but which one to save and which one to leave? I just had to plump for one as they both looked identical.
I decided to keep the one on the left - it was surprising that such a large queen cell still only contains a small pupa, as shown in the picture.
This nuc next, as you can see I've already accumulated a whole pile of discarded queen cells.
I chose to leave this cell in this colony - it was noticeably the largest and fattest of the lot. I decided to open up the end of that one extremely long queen cell I'd photographed earlier, thinking that if it contained a fully-developed queen already I could just manually release her, but surprisingly it only contained a small undeveloped pupa, despite the vast size of it!
All these came out of this one nucleus. It's not pleasant to have to cull all these developing queens but for the sake of the colonies we can't risk so many cast swarms issuing from them, as there would be little chance of any survival.
