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This morning I inspected the hives in my home apiary. Mostly they’re looking good. I had to add a super to a couple of colonies and a second brood box to another, found a queen and marked her. One colony has left me guessing however…

I opened up the hive and fairly quickly saw eggs, so clearly the queen has been present in the last three days. As I went through the frames I found three sealed queen cells and a fourth that had been torn open from the side but was still sealed at the end.

The obvious initial conclusion would be that they’ve swarmed in the last couple of days, but there’s been no activity at my bait hives (I’d expect to see at least some activty, even if they decided they didn’t want to be there eventually) and the weather has really not been swarming weather over the last few days. So the queen may still be present and the bees are waiting to swarm. But it has been lovely today, so why haven’t they gone if so?

Alternatively it may be a supersedure. The relatively small number of queen cells might suggest as much. But they still might swarm off one of the remaining queen cells.

So, I tore down one of the cells that was protruding below the bottom rail of the frame, because it was most likely to get damaged anyhow, then chose the best of the remaining two and tore down the other. If they want to supersede they still can, but if they’re swarming hopefully there’ll only be the one swarm and perhaps they’ll find my bait hive. Or I might just have lost a load of bees already and haven’t realised 😀

I could perhaps split them, leaving a frame of eggs with the flying bees, but I’m going to gamble on the supersedure I think.

In the afternoon I visited three other sites, one to add a super and the others to set out bait hives. Nothing much exciting there.