Miriam's Hive
Miriam's bees were very well behaved when I opened up their hive on Sunday. There were a few "queen cups", but none of them had eggs in them. From this, I conclude that they are not planning to swarm at the moment, probably because it rained on most days last week. Now that the sun is out, I will need to keep a closer eye on them in case they change their minds!
The Queenless Hive (Formerly Caroline's Hive)
I took Caroline out and moved her into the nucleus box two weeks ago. You may remember that this was because I found a queen cup with an egg in it. This has now been grown into a lovely big queen cell, with the new queen pupating inside. This is very good news!
However, the bees have developed an "insurance policy". As well as the queen cell that they planned, they had also created four "emergency" queen cells, as backup in case there's a problem with the one they planned. So, basically, the hive had an heir, and four spares.
This is good for the bees, but not so good for me. A beehive normally only has one queen, and this situation could lead to (up to) five queens emerging from their cells this week. The problem comes down to this: if I were to leave more than one queen cell in the hive, the queens will either fight or swarm when they emerge from the cells - and I don't want either to happen.
So, the main job of Sunday afternoon was to go through and remove the other queen cells, leaving just the big one. This should have been a straightforward job - apart from needing sharp eyes to spot the additional cells, there really isn't much to it. Unfortunately, the bees were very defensive on Sunday (no doubt defending their precious queen cells) so I got several stings for my trouble. Still, I got it done in the end.
Fellow Widcombe resident Stewart was on hand to take some photos, and got this great picture of the queen cell:
If you look closely (you'll probably have to view the photo full-screen), you'll notice that the (bottom) end looks a little ragged and there is a darker band around the cell near the bottom tip. This is because the queen is nearly ready to emerge (around 1-2 days from emerging) so the worker bees are chewing away the cell tip to make the wax layer thinner, so that it will be easier for the queen to bite through the wax and emerge. You can actually see the worker bees nibbling away in the photo!
Based on when I first saw the egg, and the condition of the queen cell in the photo, I would estimate that the cell is 14 days old. Queen bees emerge 16 days after being laid, and the photo was taken two days ago, so hopefully I should have a new queen bee today!
This next photo is interesting - one of the queen cells got sheared off as I was removing a box of frames for the inspection. This cell was probably 10-11 days old, i.e. recently capped and still had royal jelly inside (the queen larva hadn't yet eaten it all). In this picture you're looking from the bottom of the cell (sheared off around half-way) up to the top. The queen larva has been removed, and you can see the layer of royal jelly. The worker bees are taking an interest because they are going to eat the royal jelly, prior to dismantling the cell:
The next inspection will be on Saturday - hopefully I will get my first look at the new queen!
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