Number Four.

All of my queen bees are numbered but, for convenience, the number is on a laminated card pinned to the hive. However, I have just put queen number one in this box and haven't changed the number yet. 

When we went away a fortnight ago, this colony was in a five frame nucleus (small hive) with two frames occupied by brood (eggs, larvae and pupae). Checking this morning, I found that it had tried to swarm; the evidence was a few sealed queen cells, no eggs, and wall to wall brood but no trace of the queen. Having had her right hand wings clipped, the queen wouldn’t have got far; they often end up on the ground or the front of the hive being cared for by some attendants but I could find no trace of her. The prolonged period of warm weather has brought out reports of a lot of swarms but this one would have been too small to survive long. Like gardeners, there is no good time for a beekeeper to take a holiday; in a normal year it wouldn’t happen this early in this part of the world. Anyway the lost queen was getting quite old and probably would have been replaced by the bees before the autumn; the colony will have no trouble raising a replacement, and the workers who would have joined the swarm are still here.
 
I was helping a young tyro with his beekeeping problem this afternoon, though what the cause of his problem is is beyond my ken. The solution is simpler, he needs a spare colony; it could provide him with raw materials such as either eggs, to turn into a queen if his original colony doesn’t have one, or even a laying queen. His real problem is that he purchased his bees before learning what to do with them and then was too embarrassed to ask for help when he first ran into problems. The most reliable solution is to unite his bees with a known queenright colony and, with that in mind, we went to my apiary and did swarm prevention on the two colonies of mine that are getting that way inclined. It’s a process that makes a two frame nuc from each hive, which includes the queen, a couple of frames of brood and some nurse bees to care for the brood. The lad now has to nurture his nuc until it is established when he can join the two colonies together - and he has strict instructions to ask for help before he has problems.
 
The colonies that have lost their queens? They haven’t lost many bees but they will spend a month without any brood so will have nothing to do but store honey; they also have plenty of time to build up into a strong colony for the winter.