I have a Plan! - with a little help from my friends...

Things are clearer - and I now have a plan set out, well I think it's a plan. It's an idea at the very least.  OK so this is what happened today...

Another round of inspections was carried out, this time with Eugene. In the Daughter hive we saw the queen, so all is well, and we saw some eggs and larvae. But the main thing was we saw the queen!  We also shuffled about some of the frames in the top hive box i.e. we swapped some frames of foundation (at the outside edge of the box) with built out frames that were in the middle.  I hope this encourages some more building.

The inspection of the Parent hive pretty much has confirmed to me that the hive is queenless. This is a shame, and I think is the result of some over enthusiastic inspections I carried out earlier this month. We looked very hard but saw no eggs or larvae.  The is a lot of brood however. So this is what we decided to do...

We moved a frame of brood and eggs from the Daughter hive (making sure the queen wasn't on it) into the middle of the top hive box of the Parent hive. This is kind of the opposite of what I did at the beginning of May! Well, I suppose "what goes around comes around"!

The idea is that the bees in the parent will raise queen cells from this frame. The successful queen will then mate with a drone near by and then I hope start to lay.  This should all happen reasonably quickly.  A new queen should take 16 days to rear. Another week to 10 days will pass before she mates and gets down to laying.  So by early July I hope I will be able to see new eggs and larvae in the hive. This works out quite well as I'm off on holiday on Friday!

However, if there is already a queen in residence (and I just missed her during my inspections) then no queen cells should be developed and we have to go off and solve another puzzle, or at least try to figure out what is happening! Anyway, Susan has kindly said she will do an inspection this weekend for me and will check to see if any queen cells are being made with the new eggs. If they are we will leave all alone (but maybe put on another super) and wait to the beginning of July before trying to see if a new queen has taken.

This poses another question of what to do in the autumn.  If I rear another queen, do I really want to kill her in the autumn, as is suggested in the Minnesota H2Q system, or should I keep her and try to over-winter her? I think I'll worry about this later.