Saturday 16th April. Time to go into the original hive- we have taken to calling it the Wragby Hive ( it came from Thornes in Wragby)- to check out the queen cups and assess the rest of the colony. There were not many bees in the super we had left on, hardly surprising because a big proportion of the flying bees would have gone with the swarm.There were lots of stores so no problem there. It was much easier to check the frames- the bees were very calm and busy. There was capped brood, a few larvae, some noticeable drones and more queen cups than we thought!!!
Systematically going through the frames we found 7 queen cups, all sealed. This can only be put down to inexperience and maybe nervous caution when we inspected last week. The 3 we had marked were well developed and we chose one of these to keep, going by the guidelines: Well placed, good size and texture- lots of dimples on the surface-we marked this frame with a drawing pin destroyed the other queen cups and carefully reassembled the hive. Now all we can do for this hive is to wait for 2-3 weeks for the virgin queen to emerge, take her mating flight and start to lay- she will be a white queen this year so we are waiting with bated breath for her to do her stuff. The picture shows one of the queen cups we removed- it is easy to see how much bigger they are than normal worker cells.
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