Well it just goes to show if you dont keep on top of things, something is bound to happen.....last weekend we checked both hives and everything seemed to be ok plenty of activity in both hives though number one hive still not producing lots of stores to warrent a super yet so i am still feeding them a sugar solution to kick start them off. Hive number 2 has had no problems in fact the super we put on has slowly filled with honey and lots of the frames are starting to be capped, we therefore put a second super on but as of yesterday there was no sign of drawn comb yet. At the back of my mind i was aware that we had not checked hive two for over a week and also i noted that the front of the hive was not as busy as usual. Then when we checked we found over half a dozen capped queen cells......not a good sign usually means the hive is about to swarm, we demolished some of the cells but kim said leave the others as we still had not come across the queen yet....in fact we checked all the frames twice and still no sign of her. Kim wanted the last cople of queen cells left and i brought 2 whole ones indoors to photo.....except one of the cells was moving in my hand and buzzing lol....we could see that a queen was starting to break out of her cell!! I rang one of our mentors who said we could put her back in the hive or destroy her...kim wanted her put back, which i did as she had already taken the cap off by that time.
We obviously have a problem here because a number of scenarios put themselves foward
1. The old queen has died somehow and new queens have been made to compensate
2. The hive has already swarmed and the old queen has gone
3. We missed the old queen, she is still there and may kill the other queens
4. The hive is going to swarm again......
Reading up, its not unusual for hives to swarm in august due to weather and nectar flow....which judging by the weather the last few weeks may explain why the hive is doing this, i am upset as she is a young queen so should have no reason to do this plus we got her for the low tendancy to swarm....but she is a woman and you cannot always know what there thinking (boy am i going to get a clout for that comment lol) a possible awnser would be to do an artificial swarm but we dont have the equipment or experience for that. Until i can get my head around this and until we check the hive on saturday we may just have to let the bee's get on with it :( i have ordered some more feeders to see if that helps. The books say that one way to stop this happening is to provide an artificial swarm which means minipulating the hive to seperate itself without flying off. In the book it seems simple but i need to make sure the old queen is still alive first and as i said we need spare equipment as well. I may need to ring one of our mentors first and see what they suggest. Anyway enough of our dilema until the weekend i will talk to all later :)
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