Marking Queens

Last inspection we'd seen the nuc queen and knew there was a laying queen in the Star; the Moon was queenless. Purpose of the inspection today was to see whether the nuc queen had mated and if so, to mark her. I was also keen on marking the Star queen, if she wasn't the green queen from the Moon and to see how matters had developed in the Moon.

The hive entrances were all busy so the bees are all foraging and bringing back pollen and honey. We saw some enormous pollen sacs on some of the bees.

Bees bringing pollen to the nuc - before they were disturbed

Bees trying to get into the nuc after the inspection - quite a crowd!
Note the bright yellow pollen sacs.

We opened the nuc first and discovered to our delight that the queen here has started laying. There were quite a number of eggs. The bees have also started messing around with queen cups, so the nuc may be one to watch for a mini-swarm (not sure that nucs swarm, but better safe than sorry).

If you look carefully, you can see eggs - little white specks at the bottom centre of each cell.

The queen - slim, brown and elegant - was spotted fairly quickly (after all, she only has three frames to hide on) and captured and put into the marking chamber, where she was dotted with a green dot. While queens should be marked a different colour for each year, I find this is not necessary for the two hives we have, as it is easy to keep track of them.

The queen, still free, about to disappear off the edge of the comb

The queen is inside the plastic chamber. This time some of the workers were splodged with paint, too.

The freshly marked queen

In the Star things looked much better than last time: gone was the awful smell and the colony has expanded well, moving centrally up: so in the brood chamber the central five frames are fully laid out and above them in the super the middle frames are also starting to fill up. As the hive is not that full yet, the bees have not expanded to occupy all the space yet. As to be expected in this circumstance, the bees have no thoughts of swarming.
But what did surprise us was that the Star has its own dark queen (well spotted, Goulwenn). So she must have hatched from the cell we put in two weeks ago and mated quickly to start laying. She was captured (with some difficulty) and processed like the nuc queen.

Trying to capture the queen

Dotting the thorax through the criss-cross marking cage

One newly marked Star queen

With two queens spotted and marked we were going for a hat trick.However, we did not see the queen in the Moon. The queen cell we had left from last time was empty, so the queen must have hatched. But she proved elusive. The colony is definitely queen-less, as we saw no eggs or larvae, but quite happily so. This means they are expecting a mated queen soon.
But looking back, I realize we had this same situation last spring: a sudden disappearance of the Moon queen with no evidence of swarming. What do the Moon bees do with their queen? Perhaps they are revolutionaries....

What ever their administrative preferences, one super is looking close to full now and we moved the not quite ready frames to the centre and the finished ones to the edges so that hopefully soon we'll have a full super to spin out. That will be mainly rape honey - delicious!