New Queen!

Two weekends ago, I opened up hive #1, to check on the queen cell.  This is what I saw:

That is excellent - a textbook emerged queen cell.  It still amuses me that, when the queen nibbles the end off the cell, she doesn't remove it completely, but leaves a small 'hinge' on the lid.

Anyway, I didn't see the queen that day, and had to wait another week to see if I could spot her.  Which brings me to Sunday, when I opened the hive again and, after a little bit of peering about, saw this:

Yes, that is indeed the new queen!  If you didn't spot her, I promise she definitely is in the photo.  She's actually the one that is less stripy than all the worker bees.  So, think of it as a game of "Where's Waldo?" - except in this version, everyone is wearing a striped top except Waldo.

She's not laying yet - probably because the weather hasn't been great, so she hasn't had a chance to fully mate yet.  Hopefully that will all change by the weekend, and then I'll be able to mark her and name her.

Hive Swap

For a while now, June's bees in hive #2 have been a bit of a handful.  Even though I'm pretty careful when I handle them, they've been more defensive than hive #1, and they sting me fairly regularly.  Also, they have stung their landlord Nev at least once (and tried several times).  So I decided that something needed to be done.

The best option I could come up with was to swap the colony with Ottoline's bees in the nucleus.  They are very well behaved, calm, and I don't think they've stung me at all.  Normally, this would be straightforward - just pick up each hive and swap them over.  However, I'd have then ended up with the nuc where a hive should be, and it would have messed with the aesthetics of the apiary.  Which are... y'know... the most important thing.

So, I was going to have to do it the hard way.  I suited up, lit my smoker, and got ready to move the colonies frame-by-frame.  In fairness, it went pretty smoothly.  The bees were pretty well behaved throughout, and I only got one sting.

Over in hive #1, I had a look to see if they’d made any queen cells to replace Katherine (RIP).  Indeed they had - all these and more, in fact:

Here are all the cells I cut out from all the combs:

I’ve tried to arrange them in order of age from left to right, so if you look carefully (you’ll need to click on the photo to zoom) you should see the ones on the left look more ‘maggoty’, whereas you can see the ones on the right starting to differentiate into their adult segments.

I left one cell in the hive - pictured below - this will (when she hatches) become the new queen of hive #1:

I’ll take a look this coming weekend to make sure that the new queen is alive and well.