A New Queen has Risen

Some good news on the bee front at last. The first of our colonies to swarm was the one from the hive we have called Leri. We lost the swarm so the queen from this hive disappeared over the horizon along with half the colony, leaving us with depleted numbers in the hive, no queen and a couple of queen cells.

We took a look in the hive yesterday though and spotted a new queen. She has emerged from one of the queen cells and hopefully has been out on a mating flight or two and has now returned to the hive. It’s still early days as she hasn’t started laying yet, but hopefully over the next week or so she will and next time we look in the hive we’ll hopefully see some new eggs and maybe even some larvae. Lets hope she’s happy in there.

The other hives weren’t doing too badly either. The bees in the artificial swarm we made are still there but we didn’t disturb this hive too much as it is hopefully in the process of having a new queen emerge from a queen cell.

There is still something strange going on between swarm we  housed in a triple nuc box after catching it the other day and the colony in Clettwr (where the swarm came from). The bees in both of these are still very active from first light until dusk and seem to be flying from one hive to the other. I have no idea what is going on, but they seemed OK when we inspected them.

The swarm in the triple nuc box has drawn out the 3 frames that it is on and the queen is still there. The colony in the original hive seemed happy enough with lots of stores and a couple of queen cells from which to make a new queen.

Maybe once the new queen emerges they will stop flying between hives, but at the moment there seems to be a lot of traffic to and fro, almost as if the colony is split between the two hives, one at each end of our apiary. Very odd.

Tags: Beekeeping