I love working with bees, I aways learn so many things from and about them. Two items today. In the club yard I have a colony that recently re-queened. they haven't been very strong, in a 10 frame box and I debated moving them to something smaller. Today we saw only older brood and larvae, nothing younger than 7 days. So we determined there was no queen in the box. Another club member noticed a large cluster under the stand hanging on the bottom board. So what's going on, are they swarming, just hanging out? We started scooping up bees and putting them in the box. Found a small piece of new comb under the box, with eggs. Upon further conversation and reflection we determined that the bees under the box were actually a swarm, probably from a feral removal that was placed in the club yard last week, which today had about 1/4 the amount of bees. Maybe they detected a weak colony, or maybe it was just convenience. In any case, by the time I was ready to leave, they were all in the box.
Second item; I graft queens every week and sometimes I go 9 or 10 days. When I'm going a bit long, I'll put the previous graft frame above an excluder so 9 or 10 days later I can put the capped brood in the cell builder. So today I'm on a long cycle, today is day 10. I opened the top box to move the brood frame, when I pulled it out there were 3 queen cells. While I've been told that bees will make queens above an excluder, we tried it with grafts last year with no luck. So as I debate what to do with these cells, I see one open up and out she comes. Bees can make queens from larvae from day 4 to 6. So it would appear that when I moved that frame, they started making a queen from a day 6 larvae. Cut out the rest and put in incubator. Went below the excluder to get a graft frame, saw the queen, one of my Picasso's, nice gob of white on her back. Talk about good timing.
