These queen cells are a few days older than the ones I photographed last week, which is why they are bigger - the bees have had more time to extend them downwards. See how they are now starting to look like peanut shells? If we take a look from underneath, you can actually see the baby queens:
They look like tiny curled up maggots. You can see that they are each lying on a blob of yellowish-white "stuff". That's actually royal jelly - it's what they will eat until they start to pupate.
... or it would be, if I allowed that to happen. As I mentioned in the last post, if I left them until the bees closed the ends of the cells with wax, then the colony would swarm. That's not desirable, so instead I cut out the cells, and then put the frame into Miriam's hive (this is an old frame, and I'm still trying to move Florence's bees onto fresh frames).
Being an inquisitive sort, I thought I'd try tasting the royal jelly from the cells that I'd removed. It's very tangy - a bit like lemon curd, but with a really noticeable sensation that hits the back of your throat. Personally, I quite liked it.
It's interesting that Florence's hive are making a lot of queen cells, but Miriam's aren't. My suspicion is that it's because I'm removing an old frame of brood every week from Florence's hive, and this is causing the colony not to build up as quickly as it should. The bees interpret this as indicating that Florence isn't laying enough eggs (even though she is) and therefore are planning to replace her - a process known as 'supersedure'.
However, that's just a hunch. Equally possible is they just have a genetic disposition to be more "swarmy" than Miriam's bees. Both Florence and her mother were emergency queens that were raised after their sisters swarmed (before they were mated - this is known as a 'cast swarm'). Either way, I will need to keep an eye on things throughout June; by July, they should have calmed down and will no longer have the instinct to swarm.
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