Day 10 (well 11 now) :)

An interesting day sorry i did not get it down last night but both grandchildren here and i can never get anything done when that happens lol anyway where to begin....i rang the suppliers up and told them no queen turned up wednesday, when they checked tracking records their computer said that the item had been delivered but no electronic signature was received....OK...i had to go to the post office anyway so i got the tracking number and shot off to the post office. On the way there i saw the post van so stopped to ask the postman if he had tried to deliver a small parcel wednesday, but it was a different postman so he could not help....as i got back into the car he called me back saying he would ring our other postman which he did....and we found out he had tried to deliver a parcel but because no awnser (even though we left a message on door to knock loudly) so he took it back to the depot. He did not leave a card because he knew we would be picking up our other parcel from the day before....(i was not happy to say the least) anyway i shot off and collected the box opened it in the car and was pleased to see that there was 6 bee's in a small plastic cage attached to the side of the box.
One bee was dead but i could see the queen at least so i shot off home where kim was waiting and because of the time (had to pick alfie up) i got changed into my bee suit while kim sat in the shed with the bee's. The instruction say that we have to put the queen into the hive but we have to leave her in the cage....the bee's that are in the cage have to be removed leaving the queen by herself, the way to do this is to put the cage in a plastic bag empty them all out then coax the queen back into the cage and close it up....which kim managed to brilliantly :)
The next stage is to put the new queen into the hive....the cage has a small tube filled with candy/sugar which the bee's start to eat, this should take a day or 2 for them to get through to where the queen is, because she is giving off pheramones, by the time the bee's get to her they are used to her smell and will accept her as their queen.
The cage is wedged between two of the brood frames which i did (she ended up with honey over the cage) and put back into the hive where we have to leave it for a couple of days before checking that she has got her self free, if not we are to open the cage and let her out so sunday will be when we find out how everything is. One note to point out which i was very impressed about was that kim came over to the hives with me in just PJ's and marigolds whilst i was doing this....she's a braver person than me lol but as she pointed out 'I would not of done it if they were not so docile' :) i forgot to take pictures as so caught up in the moment but will get some later....talk to you all soon l8rs
Couple of pictures b4 i finish this particular post

As you can see here we have workers still going in to the hive bringing pollen with them what was interesting was all pollen going into hive 1 (the above picture) was white, i will have to see if this shows in the stores when we look tomorrow. The next picture made me grin as i kept seeing this happen when so many bee's were flying around...

lots fall over or go head over heels...this one looks tired and has decided to have a sit down lol