Top left: spot our truly amazing queen

Top right: some of the hexagons contain her next offspring

3 July 2015

Today, we were particularly keen to find out if the one queen we share between 3 colonies (and whom we marked for ‘easy identification’ – ha! – two weeks ago) could be spotted and/or if there were signs of her producing new brood. We were also curious to see if the two other colonies had raised a new queen. The weather turned tropical more or less overnight four days ago, so *IF* there are new queens, the conditions for mating are excellent.

Both queenless hives (one the result of a split – the A-hive, one that been queenless since we got the colony in April – the B-hive) lacked any sign of a new queen (no new brood) so we robbed the colony with the queen (the C-hive) and gave a frame with uncapped brood to the long-suffering B-hive.

We hope the B-hive either has an unmated queen in the making or will raise one from the new brood we gave them.

We hadn’t seen the queen that Thomas marked 2 weeks ago during our last inspection, but we spotted her today AND she’s been laying plenty of new brood. So much actually that we gave this colony a honey super today and moved some of the frames to the new honey box. Having spotted her once, we couldn’t see her again … which was a bit awkward as we moved one frame with uncapped brood to another hive, and three frames up to a honey super and were keen to leave her behind in the right spot. Time will tell! This queen, I have to repeat once more, has kept our three colonies ticking over. She really is the BEES KNEES. And I’d love to know where this expression comes from.

We also inspected the A-hive, which has two brood boxes (but no queen as yet) and three honey supers – one full height and two smaller ones. There was plenty of honey in two of the supers. Fingers crossed this colony too has a queen on the go. They were a little stressed today when we handled them but still, pretty good natured considering there’s no queen in there.

The last three days have been between 25 and 30°C so lots of flying activity in all hives.