This colony continued to expand and I added a further 2 supers and then another one, at each inspection, although I wasn't always stung, it seemed like it was in a battle of wills. At this time my back was playing up, I had injured it the previous year and so lifting heavy supers became a bit of a chore, I needed help! My less than enthusiastic youngest son reluctantly agreed to give me a hand with 'my number one colony'. I had warned him that these bees were a little on the tetchy side, he wasn't deterred by my warning. "They don't bother me!" was his macho response.
We removed the top two supers together, then the next two and the final one, queen excluder removed and we were into the brood nest. With double brood colonies I tend to take the top one off, briefly look at the base of the combs before placing this aside in an upturned roof. This way I can get in indication of whether or not the bees are preparing to swarm, usually swarm cells in such a colony are built between the brood boxes. There were sealed queen cells! This, according to the books means that, almost certainly, the colony has swarmed. I needed to try to find the queen, in the vain hope that she was still there and I could salvage the situation. I proceeded to remove each frame from the lower brood box, shaking bees off after determining that the queen wasn't on the frame. The bees were determined to assert their authority and proceeded to fly up, ping off my veil and bounce off of my hands, I fought back, puffing smoke and shaking frames, moving 'with purpose' but as gently as possible, I read somewhere not to show fear, does that really work? It was then that I heard my son over the loud buzzing say "Dad..........Dad..........Dad, I'm feeling ........er ....... a bit............intimidated!" I told him to move away if he was scared, to which he replied "I'm not scared, I was just letting you know......" I chuckled to myself (he's so macho!) as I carried on.
Both brood boxes inspected, no queen seen and no eggs either, I had always seen this particular queen at every inspection, some queens are elusive and are rarely seen unless you make a conservative effort, so I concluded that she had indeed left. This was not necessarily a negative for me, the colony was still really strong, it was in swarming mode, geared up to make queen cells and I was due to do queen rearing next week, this would be my cell builder! I therefore took down all queen cells and put the hive back together. Seven days later I would inspect again to remove the any emergency queen cells, rearrange the hive and introduce grafted larvae from my selected breeder queen. Happy days.
Seven days later and my son was ........... nowhere to be seen! I managed to take the supers off myself and found the hive to be ......... full of eggs and larvae. Further searching revealed the old queen proudly parading across the comb, I'm sure I heard her laughing as she walked around the side of the frame away from me: Grafting day was postponed. I admit to cursing just a little as I reassembled the hive but not so loud as the bees could hear.
The following week, I confronted my nemesis again. I could not find any eggs, queen or queen cells. What was going on? Had she left after the last inspection? I have, previously, had queens swarm when I have found nearly sealed queen cells, removed the queen cells and on the next inspection found the queen to be gone, having left no queen cells, eggs or larvae. I assume that they had made their mind up to go, thought that everything was in-order in the home hive and hadn't given my late intrusion another thought. This was another case of the same surely? I decided to reinspect the whole hive, nothing in the brood nest, searching further though I found a huge queen sealed queen cell on the outer most honey frame, two frames away from the brood nest. It was of course sealed, was this a supersedure cell? She had certainly gone, swarmed or been dispatched by her daughters that were probably as fed up with her as I was? I took the cell down, I didn't want to propagate from this queen but I did want to use the colony's resources to raise new queens from my selected stock, it was back to plan-A, use it as a cell raiser.
Another seven days later, I was expecting the bees, being queen-less, to be in a bad mood. Not so! They were reasonable well behaved and I soon found out why, there were eggs, larvae and a laughing queen present. I boxed them up and decided to let them get on with it. I didn't do proper hive inspections on this colony for the rest of the season, I would take a look at the supers and split the two brood boxes to look for queen cells in the bottom of the top box, none were found so I assumed all was well.
I took off three supers of honey from this hive, later than from my other colonies, leaving them with two partially filled supers above a crown board. From the weight of the brood boxes they had plenty of stores to last them through to the ivy flow when I would assess them for feeding requirements. I was really pleased an almost, leave it alone, hive had given me my biggest honey crop of the year and a very nice honey it was too.
After the varroa treatments I did notice the odd wasp or two entering this colony when visiting the apiary but thought that they were strong enough to cope. A few weeks later though I discovered that my lassie faire attitude had been wrong. The hive was completely robbed out, the supers were empty, as were the brood boxes. There was no evidence of any dead brood but just a small cluster of dead bees, about the size of my hand, in the centre of the cluster was my yellow marked queen. She wasn't laughing any more! I lamented over the loss of this queen and her colony, due obviously to the neglect of my duties as a beekeeper and, let's face it, down-right cowardice! I sealed up the hive entrance and made a promise to myself never to neglect my duties again, however many stings I should receive.
At least ten days later I dismantled the hive and took it home to salvage and sterilise any usable frames and to clean up the boxes. At home I discovered a few live bees walking on the outer-most frames, further investigation revealed that the dead cluster wasn't dead after all, the queen, although not laughing anymore, was alive too! What should I do? The colony was clearly too small to make it through winter. I decided to put them into an Apidea that thankfully I had neglected to remove the comb from, I had cleaned out all but this last one. I drizzled some honey into the comb and carefully transferred the queen and her remaining entourage. I took them into my house, sealed up of course, for a day. After a day in the warm and with a source of food they were buzzing to get out. As luck, or maybe bad fortune would have it, I had another colony that had become queen-less after varroa treatment and so decided to introduce this queen under a mesh cage on a frame of emerging brood from another hive to the queen-less one. To my relief and amazement she started to lay again and so the field bees began to bring pollen into the hive. I have fed them and given fondant as the colder weather came in.
They are, in my opinion, the least likely my colonies to make it through to the spring but having said that, would you bet against this particular queen?
I may well be facing my old nemesis again next year and probably without my macho son.
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