This year has been so full of problems, of our doing, I don’t know where to start.
At the beginning of March, our bees were very active and the queen was laying well. The brood frames still had plenty of stores and the inner frames have eggs, lava, and pupa. There was a steady build-up of honey in the supper which we had left on over the winter for additional food for the bees.
Around the end of March disaster struck. I must have crushed the queen, although we never found her body. The bees started to make queen cells which at the time we had only a vague idea the hive was queenless. We made our most potentially catastrophic decision and took the queen cells down.
At we went into early April we noticed our bees behaving in a more aggressive manner when we opened the hive. On inspecting the hive we found what looked like emergency queen cells. It was decided to take out one of the frames that had 2 queen cells with attending bees and placed it with capped brood and bees into a nuc box.
We decided to do this because we had realised that the hive was queenless and would most likely die out with other bees robbing the hive of stores.
We moved all the remaining brood frames into the centre of the box and put fresh frames at the front and back. Our thinking was that this would ensure the brood would be kept warm should a cold snap occur. Also with two potential queen cells we should have a colony that would survive and expand as spring progressed into summer.
Now we had two small colonies of bees, one in the hive and one in the nuc box. As April gave way to May we were aware that swarming was a possibility if the queen cells all emerged.
The bees in the nuc were extremely busy and on opening the hive after some 4 weeks we found uncapped and capped lava and both queens had emerged. This colony was building very quickly and our concern was that they would start to become crowded, as the nuc box only holds 6 frames.
The potential for the colony to swarm was high if only due to overcrowding
More to tell you in the next blog