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.