After recent bee successes; starting a third colony and re-queening to clear chalk brood issues we have been feeling pretty good. Halfway through our first full season and we feel we have been breaking new beekeeping ground, for us anyway.
We have Blue hive, a very prolific strong colony that we used to start two nucs. Pink, a decent sized colony that after removing a queen that was a bit on the slow side and not helping with the significant chalk brood hiccup was back in action and laying well. True our Green hive made with one of the nucs sadly created great emergency queen cells, matured a queen then unfortunately lost her somewhere, maybe eaten on the mating flight? But having successfully combined that little colony with the other nuc we still reckon we're up on the deal.
Last weeks' hive check has shown Blue hive seemingly back up to great strength, still lots of capped brood in the main brood box and recently drawn out brood super though they are a little slack in drawing out their honey supers. Yellow - all systems go. Pink however has had a bit of calamity we think.
Last week Karen didn't observe the pink hive queen in person but did see plenty of egg so was happy. She was also pleased to report that they were filling a honey super. This week however, disaster. I checked pink, didn't see a queen and could see only a few uncapped larvae and absolutely no egg.
Looks like we've lost the queen.
We can't figure out why. There is plenty of space, no sign of excessive nurse bees and nothing to suggest any reason for swarming that we can see. The queen whilst new, was carefully introduced and has spent the last few weeks happily laying within the hive seemingly accepted by the other bees. So where has she gone? We don't think we've crushed her or accidently damaged her, the hive seems happy, non-aggressive and full of bees. I can't imagine that she would swarm so shortly after seemingly being accepted into the colony and we've been out in the garden from dawn until dusk over the last week and had no sign of swarming.
I'm hoping that I just missed her, this hive contains some of our older comb, it wasn't the brightest day and eggs are hard to see. But I also think I checked pretty carefully, particularly once I became concerned. On the cuff I grabbed a super brood frame from blue and shoved it into the middle of the pink brood and sealed up the hive. I'm hoping that if the queen is present and hiding (probably wishful thinking at this point) that she'll be visible when we check in a couple of days. If she has died/gone then at least the remaining bees will now have access to some egg to start making emergency queen cells - seeing those would confirm our fears but hopefully indicate that the colony is adapting for survival. Of course in either case we are disappointed that one of our two decent colonies would now be unlikely to make any honey for us - we were looking forward to trying some this year but most important is getting them back to having a reliable queen, otherwise our well populated pink hive is in danger...
Fingers crossed and we'll update in a few days when we plan to have a decent extra check of pink to find out what is going on.
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