An all Bee weekend

Just doing lots of Bee stuff all weekend, started with Friday. Went up to PSJ with Eddie to take a colony out of a window behind the hurricane shutter. Big colony, a lot of honey but nearly no capped brood, and no larvae or eggs, so this was a queen-less colony and a real rescue. Saturday I spent the day with several other club members at the new Honey Bee Research Lab at UF.  Met some more odd people (they play with bees too). Toured the facility and made some friends. Excited about Bee College this October.  Last week Stuart removed two swarms from the local marina, both in relatively the same area. So we discussed the three removals, the swarms and the window bees and decided to combine both swarms, find one of their queens and re queen the window bees.  Sounded like a plan. Started in swarm 2, found the queen, caught her in a clip and tucked her away.  On to swarm 1. Did not actually see the queen but we found one side of 1 frame fully drawn and capped brood, larvae and eggs on the other side, even found eggs in some burr comb we cut off.  So the caged queen went in the window bees box and we were going to merge the two swarms through paper. Went to get yet another swarm from the marina, pretty easy, scraped them in a box, put on a queen excluder and waited a little while. The bees that we missed went in the box so we're fairly certain we got the queen. Back to the club yard to set things up. Going to merge the two swarms first. Opened the queen less box and there were no bees. Looked around, did not see a swarm. Thought they may have gone to the box with their old queen. Opened swarm 1 and found the missing bees. The box was packed full of bees, they merged themselves while we were gone, added the other box and frames to give them more room.   Always fascinated by these little bugs. Other events in the yard. Loriann got her second box started with some top bars that we hung on modified hangers. And John got a nuc split, two frames and a bunch of bees. They have the means to make a queen, just need to see what happens. I did another set of queen grafts today. While I am having a certain amount of success getting cells, my percentage of mated queens sucks. But I'm sure it will get better.  There are a lot of methods, I just need to find what works best for me.