Bees in the Hive?

When I began to think about bee keeping and took a course I was given a little laminated card with the 5 questions to answer when you do a hive inspection.

Earlier in the year after a family get together when we had to deal with a swarm we found our 5 questions had been made 6! 

Well this week the answer most definitely was no, some of them were under the hive! The last colony we have this year with a white queen had decided they wanted a new queen- they began making queen cells. We removed the queen and left just one strong cell. All seemed well until it seemed obvious there was no laying queen in the hive. We decided to unite it with the hive nearest which had a good laying queen, ultimately we want to go into the winter with 4 hives again and after artificial swarms this year we have 8 so it seemed logical to begin uniting now while there is a good nectar flow on. The hive with no queen has filled the brood box and 2 supers with stores and seemed very calm, so preparations were made. Gradually we moved the hives closer and it was then that I noticed a huddle of bees between the hive floor and the varroa slide. 

Thinking the queen may somehow have ended up under the hive I tried to brush them out and them emptied them back in the hive. Next day they were back, so we decided to leave them and deal with them after we merged the hive and could get to them under the floor. It took about 3 days to get the 2 hives gradually close enough to merge and on Saturday evening we united the 2 hives with the newspaper method- I will explain this another time!

It became obvious in those 3 days the bees had made themselves at home- they had begun to make comb! 

We had taken a nucleus box with us and emptied the bees into this and as I emptied them in I saw the queen- a beautiful big plump queen! The comb they had made was lovely new wax and it clearly shows how bees make their own bee space as they build. As I looked through the comb I could also see new eggs- so the queen had mated - quite how she had ended up under the hive is a mystery- we have had some awful weather and it may be that she had somehow not made the entrance as she came back from her mating flight and had just crawled up underneath and taken up residence there. The bees inside the hive must have sensed  her there and just kept on doing what they should.

After 24 hours the merged hive looked busy- no signs of newspaper outside yet, but lots of bees going in the nuc box as well. So although we have merged 2 hives we now have ended up with another nucleus to deal with, and one with what looks like a lovely queen at that!