Another bee blip

Another day, another swarm. We thought we'd seen the end of the swarming season, but no. We now think that when the bees swarmed the first time, the original queen flew off with a load of workers and established a new colony, leaving the original colony with a very young, or maybe unhatched, queen to take over. We, in our infinite wisdom, then went through the hive and killed all developing queen cells so that they wouldn't produce another queen and swarm again. However, they needed another queen and so began making more. Today, about 5 queens emerged and flew off with some more workers. It's very unusual for more than one queen to emerge and survive to fly, but I suppose we'd made them take some desperate measures.

We did manage to collect the swarm and even take a couple of the queens out, leaving the other 3 to fight for the crown. As there were so many queens there were also divided loyalties and not all the bees were keen to follow the others into the nucleus hive. Once a couple of queens had been removed, Lauren sped things up by scooping handfuls of bees from the wall to the hive. She wasn't stung once.