I set of yesterday with a plan to pull a load of supers of for extraction..i took 12 empty supers with me with drawn foundation to replace any i removed...well as we know nothing ever goes as planned where bees are concerned..only two supers out of 25 could be removed all the others failed the shake test and the refractometer was reading 21% on most of the frames and none where fully capped so i left them all on..first extraction last year was the 10 June so i may be a tad premature but saying that everything is more advanced this year..
Any way forgetting about extraction i ended up having to do two artificial swarms on two 2019 buckfast colonies...the Queens are now in nucs with a sealed Queen cell left in each colony..i needeed to do a third AS on a 2018 buckfast colony but i think i missed the boat on that one..several sealed Queen calls where found with no eggs present and no marked clipped Queen to be found anywhere so i knocked all but one Queen cell down and closed them up..
The strange day never ended there.. ..The virgin Queen i released from a Queen cell 9 days ago decided to go on a mating flight or orientation flight..on returning she must have undershot the landing board and ended up under the open mesh floor..a big ball of bees where gathering around her with many more fanning there nasonov glands towards the quickly growing cluster..
I had to remove the brood box and replace the floor with another floor and plonk the brood box on the new floor..i then turned the floor with the Queen on it upside down and propped it up at the entrance..instantly the bees started marching in.. i did not see the Queen go in but by the nasonov glands aiming at the hive entrance said to me that the Queen was now where she should be.. .
Here is a picture of the bees marching in on a upside down mesh floor..
Any way forgetting about extraction i ended up having to do two artificial swarms on two 2019 buckfast colonies...the Queens are now in nucs with a sealed Queen cell left in each colony..i needeed to do a third AS on a 2018 buckfast colony but i think i missed the boat on that one..several sealed Queen calls where found with no eggs present and no marked clipped Queen to be found anywhere so i knocked all but one Queen cell down and closed them up..
The strange day never ended there.. ..The virgin Queen i released from a Queen cell 9 days ago decided to go on a mating flight or orientation flight..on returning she must have undershot the landing board and ended up under the open mesh floor..a big ball of bees where gathering around her with many more fanning there nasonov glands towards the quickly growing cluster..
I had to remove the brood box and replace the floor with another floor and plonk the brood box on the new floor..i then turned the floor with the Queen on it upside down and propped it up at the entrance..instantly the bees started marching in.. i did not see the Queen go in but by the nasonov glands aiming at the hive entrance said to me that the Queen was now where she should be.. .
Here is a picture of the bees marching in on a upside down mesh floor..