Hallelujah!

I have a laying queen again. Quite how she got out to get busy with the lads given the weather we've had recently I've no idea. Maybe there's some geordie in her.

Our swarm looks like it might have swarmed though and very recently. 3 sealed queen cells, still 3 frames of space to play with and eggs in the brood. Given she's only been laying about a month she's not marked yet and we couldn't find her despite us both going over the frames while looking over each other's shoulders.

This time we've moved one cell into a Nuc with attending bees plus a donor frame from my colleague's hive, a frame of stores and two of foundation. The other we've left in place for now. We broke open the cell we removed and there's a very white, but definitely queen shaped pupae there which means, frankly that I've no idea how much time we've got before they emerge. Either way we intend to return on saturday or sunday, weather depending and see if we've got any new eggs in the hive. If not we know she's definitely gone and we can leave the remaining queen cell in place. In the meantime we try and get some advice as to what the flipping hell is going on.

Update...

I was kind of waiting until I had, hopefully, a happy ending to report, so I'll start where there is good news.

The swarm hive took it's own sweet time, but after 4 weeks the queen came into lay and despite an attempt to swarm seems to be settling in ok. The joys of working with foundation when there's a full flow on, the poor sods just dont seem to be able to draw foundation quick enough, pack the brood area with nectar and pollen, decide they're running out of room and start making queen cells.

My hive remains queenless. I last took a peek on Wednesday and still had my solitary queen cell, sealed, on the frame. We did have the seasonal bee inspector round which we both found incredibly useful, it's the first time anyone with any experience has looked things over since we started back in April. Thankfully there were no major issues to report but the hints and tips given, especially in the context of looking over hives that we're familiar with were priceless.

By my reckoning the queen should have emerged Yesterday perhaps today at the latest, so if the weather holds up, I'm hoping to go take a quick peek this afternoon, check she's emerged and see just how little brood area remains for her to hopefully lay in. There is a partially drawn super in place so I might try and see if I can coax them to move some stores into the super or might consider swapping some frames of stores for foundation to draw and hopefully leave some room for the queen.