Cum Laude

It took me three attempts to pass the first public examination I ever took: English Language Ordinary Level. I understand that it might need more than one try to get the hang of a test. 

This colony has been behaving strangely for some time. They were numerous and vigorous; they produced a new queen in June who successfully mated and began to lay prodigiously, rapidly filling the frames with young brood. We anticipated their summer honey crop. Then everything came to a sudden, unexplained, grinding halt. On a visit in early July there were suddenly no eggs, no young larvae and we could not find a queen

This is not unheard of. Maybe I clumsily damaged her when doing am inspection. Maybe she just died suddenly. Maybe she was imperfect in some way and her eggs were exhausted. What is very unusual is for the colony to not react to the loss and not create queen cells from the last eggs laid, in order to rear a replacement. A colony 'knows' it is queenless within an hour or two of becoming so; if they do not produce a new queen, they are doomed. Somehow, they failed the first test

We took a frame containing eggs from another colony and put it into this one - the technical term for this is a 'test frame'! A queenless colony will almost always use this opportunity to raise a replacement queen from the donated eggs. In this case they happily took the eggs, and used them to raise new workers... but no queen. A second test failed

The day before going away we checked them again. They were agitated, uneasy, fractious. They stung me three times, which is unheard of in our relationship. This is typical behaviour for a colony that is lacking a queen, and the calming effects of the pheromones that she releases to communicate with them. Somehow, I thought, they have caught on to their predicament; so we gave them one more chance: yet another test frame with quite a small patch of eggs in the centre on both sides

Today we discovered this result. The image contains eight queen cells, there are as many again out of shot, and a similar number on the other side of the frame. Let's call that a pass! 

In related news, the wasps' nest that I tried to destroy is still there - they have dug themselves a new entrance and appear to be thriving. In retaliation, they have found a way into the bee shed, which is now a mass of flying, buzzing, crawling wasps, like a scene from a horror movie. They are robbing the honey or sugar residues from the frames that I have stored there. At least this is distracting them from trying to rob the hives, but we obviously have to come up with a plan B