Start of the Season

This week, the weather suddenly changed.  Gone was the drizzle and April showers, and suddenly we're in glorious sunshine, with temperatures as high as 24°C.  Finally, on Wednesday, I got to open the hives!

There were basically three tasks for the day:

• If the colony in the double-height nucleus is strong enough, split the colony.
   
• In the hives, move the honey supers from underneath the brood boxes (my preferred winter configuration) to the top, with the queen excluder between (this is the summer configuration).
   
• Check for queens, and the overall health and well-being of the colonies.

So, let's step through how the year's first inspection went:

The Nucleus

Part of the reason for splitting the double-height nucleus was so that I could move the blue nuc (which has a fixed floor, and is slightly more portable) over to Sydney Gardens, where the colony will move into the ZEST hive.  But first I had to check all was well.

The bees were busy - a good sign.  I found the queen (Elena) in the top half of the double-height nuc (the brown nucleus), so I swapped the frame she was on into the blue nuc, and moved another frame the other way.  This left the blue nuc with bees, stores (honey), brood (capped, uncapped and eggs) and a laying queen.  All good.

The brown nuc now has 5 frames of bees, stores, brood and eggs, but no queen.  This is no problem at all - the bees will start to make queen cells, and within 4 weeks I should have a laying queen in the brown nuc.  Task completed!

Hive #1

Fairly busy - of the 11 frames in the brood box, all had bees on them, and there were six frames of brood.  the queen (Laura) gave me the run-around, and I had to go through the brood box twice before I eventually found her.  The colony looked healthy and busy.  I put the brood box back at the bottom of the hive, then the queen excluder with the super on top, and closed the hive.  Task completed!

Hive #2

I was actually a little surprised that there are still bees in this hive, because of the outbreak of Sacbrood that I observed in the autumn.  But they are still hanging on in there, even though it's now quite a small colony.  Finding the queen (Maria) was easy.  But there is a problem - the brood.  There were only three frames of brood, and it all looked like this:

Bad brood

The dome-shaped cappings are characteristic - this is all drone brood.  And yet I have a queen who is less than a year old;  normally I wouldn't expect a queen to start failing until she's in her third season at least.  Has she become sick in some way, and her spermatheca is no longer working?  She is still laying eggs (I saw some), so why are they all unfertilised (male) drones?

Then, on another frame, I spotted a queen cell, with royal jelly in it, and a roughly 3-day old embryo.  And while putting this post together, I took a closer look at the photo above and saw this:

Emergency Queen Cell?

That looks to me like an emergency queen cell.  This suggests that one of two things is going on - either:

1. The queen is still laying a tiny number of worker eggs, and when she does they are getting "promoted" to queens.  Or...
    
2. The workers are creating queen cells, because they know the queen is failing, but they have no female eggs to work with.  So they are raising drones in queen cells.  I had a nucleus a few years ago where this happened - the workers will realise there is something wrong with the queen cells a couple of days after they're capped, and then destroy the (drone) larva and the cell.

So, I'm hoping it's [1], and the colony will soon get a new queen.  Otherwise, I will have to intervene (possibly by donating a queen cell from the nucleus, assuming that they make more than one).

The next inspection day looks like Saturday 28th April, so until then I will be crossing my fingers and hoping the bees sort things out for themselves.