Down to earth with a bump...

So far I have learned one very important lesson in beekeeping above all others. Just when you think you're starting to get the hang of things your bees bring you back to down to earth with a bump.

Last week I found queen cells. Rushing back to solicit advice from my internet mentors on the BBKA forums I returned the following day and took the, with hindsight, misguided decision based on the fact that the hive isn't full to simply knock down the queen cells and see if removing the QX from beneath the Super supressed the urge to Swarm. While removing the cells last week I found a sealed cell in the middle of one of the frames. At that point I stopped removing the cells and re-examined every frame to try and find the queen. There she was, the showers last week had presumably held them off from swarming and I thought all was well.

Yesterday I re-examined the hive. Reaching the brood nest, it was immediately apparent that I had no eggs in any of the frames and checking each frame twice confirmed my fears that I had no queen.

Further examination also revealed another Sealed queen cell and 4-5 uncapped cells. I removed the sealed cell as, given the time frame (it definitely wasn't there last weekend), my fear was it was an "emergency" cell made with an older larvae.

I've currently left the "best" 3 uncapped cells in place and my intention is to return tonight, reinspect the frame and reduce this down to a single cell in the hope of reducing the chances that I'll further weaken the hive by allowing cast swarms to leave.

I'm really annoyed with myself at the moment, I've lost a queen, and a number of bees although not so many that I actually realised they'd swarmed until I couldn't find any eggs and I could have prevented it by trying to manage their desire to swarm rather than bulldoze over it. Given their overall size, still only covering nine frames in total I didn't want to try and split them this year, but instead I've probably put them in a worse situation than if I'd just taken the queen, a frame of brood and a few bees and stuck them in a Nuc.

On a brighter note, our little swarm that we hived a few weeks back, now has a mated, laying queen in residence, so we do at least still have two queenright hives on site.