Where's Florence?

So, yesterday's inspections started with Florence's hive.  As soon as I got the roof and crown board off, I could see the bees' behaviour was a little odd.  They weren't exactly doing nothing (the afternoon had brightened up just as I got to the hives, so there was plenty of foraging to do), but they didn't exactly seem busy either.  I decided to go through the frames fairly quickly, just to see if there was any reason for this odd behaviour.  There was.

The first clue was more queen cells.  These were different from last week's - the bees had fully extended them, and capped the end.  There were four in total - each with a baby queen bee now growing inside.  The second clue was the clincher - no eggs.  In fact, no brood less than around 6 days old.  A slower check through each frame confirmed my suspicion - Florence was gone.

But where?  There are two possibilities.  The first is that she swarmed.  This is possible, but I think unlikely.  Firstly, there are at least the same amount of bees in the hive as there were last week.  Secondly, there are plenty of honey stores in the hive, which the bees would have consumed if they were going to swarm.

So, we come to the second, more likely possibility, and for me the probable explanation.  I mentioned last week my suspicions that the workers thought their queen was failing.  It seems they have taken matters into their own hands, and "done her in".  Treachery!  Revolution!  The queen has been executed;  the independent kingdom of Florence is no more.  The workers have revolted, and declared a republic!  Vive la...

... hang on.  This is all well and good, but bee hives do not thrive on republicanism.  In fact, they need a queen to keep up the steady production of up to 2,000 eggs a day, to sustain the numbers of workers needed to keep the colony ticking over.  And let's not forget the four queen cells.  What we actually have here is an interregnum - in just over a week, those new queens will hatch, and one of them will take over the hive.

I'm perfectly happy with this outcome - I like to change one or other of the queens each year anyway.  Plus, it gives me an opportunity.  Three of the queen cells are on one frame, but the fourth is on another - and I can use this extra baby queen to set up a new colony.  Splitting the colony in this way means that, as well as the two "main" hives, I get to keep an additional colony, which will give me some flexibility (if, for example, I lose a queen in the autumn, I can replace her with the queen from the spare colony).

So, I move the frame with the solitary queen cell, along with another full of capped brood, and plenty of bees, and put them into a separate box with three frames of winter honey that I hadn't got round to dealing with.  This separate box is called a "nucleus" (often abbreviated to "nuc"), and is basically a half-width hive.  Here's the new colony, settling in to their new home:

Onto Miriam's hive.  Again, they have been good as gold - no queen cells, plenty of eggs and brood, and the honey frames are staring to fill up nicely.  In fact, I decided to add an extra super with 10 empty frames, so that they have plenty of storage space for all the nectar that they're bringing in.  Here's the hive starting to get taller:

I recently painted the hive stand white, and if you look closely you'll see there are extra boards screwed to the sides.  This is part of a project I've been working on - I'll explain more next week.