So finally this afternoon I looked at the bees in my own garden. If you remember I was concerned that I saw some queen cells in them last weekend. Well, put it down to inexperience, or just the fact that it could have been blind panic at the time, but clearly I confused a drone cell (which was all on it's own) with a possible queen cell. I am now certain these queen cells were actually not that! How am I sure? Well I looked through Susan's hive this afternoon and saw very clearly what a queen cell looks like! They are much, much, bigger! How could I forget?
There I was, fully expecting to see queen cells throughout my hives, but I saw none! I think the fact I was in a hurry on Sunday made me make the confused diagnosis. What this all meant was that I didn't feel I needed to carry out any swarm prevention measures. I was fully prepared to implement the Demaree method and had all my excluders and frames ready etc. But on seeing they were drone cells I backed out and let the queens pretty much carry on as they were. I did leave some syrup in one of the hives, but come Friday I think I will remove this.
Now on to Angry Bees! Susan had a bad experience yesterday. A bee got into her veil and stung her on the lip while she was looking through her hive. Another bee then stung her on the arm. She suffered some considerable swelling! The other result was that she didn't get to look properly in her hive. This afternoon I offered to take a look - probably bravado after feeling good about my hives!
Her split was pretty calm, but somehow a bee also got inside my veil!!! Thankfully I did not get stung, but I did re-tie the veil! What did I see? Well no queen that was clear, but plenty of capped queen cells at the bottom of the frames! This is confusing. Susan had already spoken to Eugene about this and his suggestion was to just let the bees replace the missing one. Why not, it could be interesting and I suspect the gene pool in the neighbourhood will be good. I know of at least 4 hives nearby with 'hygenic' queens, and so good drones for the new queen should be easy to find. Susan will loose some production on this hive, but as she was trying to build this up to go through winter then she is probably OK.
Susan's parent hive was next and this was just plain nasty !!!! My gauge is my own hives and one is very, very, calm and does not get very excited, even when I rip it apart. My other hive gets more agitated; the bees tend to fly about and around you a bit, but they don't do much else. I was thinking these bees were a bit unpleasant, until I met Susan's! Wow they are brutes!
I had to get right inside her hive and so there were bits of hive body lying about on stands, the ground etc. So bees everywhere. I pretty quickly established that there were capped queen cells present (together with the existing queen) and so we have implemented the Demaree method. I put the frame of bees with the queen in the bottom deep, added an excluder over it and then popped some supers on.
Then I had to deal with the deeps. The 'fun' started when I started to remove the queen cells!! The bees came for me and started stinging my veil and suit and gloves. Stings embedded everywhere, but thankfully NOT in me! My son, who was warned about the nature of these bees, was watching from about 30 feet away and got stung twice! Yes, I did tell him he wasn't going to get any medals for being stung, but did he listen? Anyway, we succeeded to remove all the queen cells (I hope). We'll give it 8 to 10 days before going back in to remove any further queen cells we find; to check on the queen and possibly remove brood. Can't say I'm looking forward to that!
Personally, I think this queen needs to go, and soon. You really can't beat a good execution when it comes to royalty!
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