Gone!

Well I'm a bit shell shocked!  My fantastic, highly productive "Blue" Queen has gone!  Not a sign of her in the hive!  I went in to the hive on Sunday morning; admittedly it's the first time in about a month, and got a bit of an unpleasant surprise.

I saw no brood, other than some spotty drone brood, and rather tellingly, several queen cells!  Doom! she must have swarmed I thought! But the queen cells were not just in the classic supersedure location (at the bottom of the frames), some were also on the body of the frames.  So I'm not really sure if she left, or died and is now being replaced.  I counted about 6 capped and therefore vital queen cells.  I reckon with all the absence of brood the hive must have been queenless for about 3 weeks, as it takes 21 days for an egg to be transformed into a hatched bee. So something happened just after we went on vacation. But what?

Anyhow where does this leave me?  Well I think it's actually quite interesting.  I was already thinking about re-queening this hive, albeit in the spring, but re-queening nevertheless. All this means is that the process I was going to induce has been brought forward a bit.  A lot of people swear by re-queening in the late summer as a good young queen can give a hive a healthy start to the next year.

So, I think the capped cells that I left in the hive will hatch in the next few days. Subsequently an emerging queen will take about a week to get ready for her maiden flight (but it could be less than this) and with luck she will return mated and will start laying soon after.  So in about 2 weeks I may be able to observe some new brood!  I'm pretty confident that with all the bee hives in the neighbourhood the drone stock out there will be from selected 'hygenic' stock and I could have another good laying queen on my hands for little fuss and bother.

Oh, and there's another major bonus!  The absence of a queen for about 3 weeks means that any mites that were in the hive should be killed off! The lack of brood will have disrupted their life cycle. No brood means no cells containing pupae in which the female mite can lay her young!  All in all it could be doubly good news.  You have to remain positive! Perhaps every could does have a silver lining?