Queen Cells

Having discovered last inspection that the Moon was showing swarming tendencies, I was prepared for taking swarm control measures during the inspection today. I had a nuc box prepared, as well as the empty Star, as I wanted to rear two new queens: one in the Moon (after having transferred the old Moon queen to the Star) and one in a nuc box, as last year. Of course, the bees decided to be different and thwart my plans.

The weather has been rotten lately, so I was not hugely surprised to see them flying around in force in the sunshine today. As soon as I opened the Moon and started checking, I realized though that not all was fine in the Moon. The bees had not swarmed yet - that was obvious: we were inundated in bees. However, in the brood box I counted no fewer than twelve viable queen cells, three of which were sealed. Usually the old queen flies off before the queen cells are sealed, so obviously the bad weather had kept her inside. The playcups I had ignored last time had obviously been turned into full queen cells, though I still don't understand how the bees could have moved so fast to have sealed queen cells in the space of 7 days. There must have been eggs in some, though I didn't see any. Will have to read up on that again.

Three queen cells on one side - two of which are sealed

So, saved from losing a swarm by the bad weather, Goulwenn and I examined all frames carefully, looking for the newly-marked queen. Nothing. We went through all frames twice, but failed to find her. How do you do swarm control without finding the queen? I know there is some complicated method, but I didn't want to try that. As the bees starve the queen before swarming, so she is fit to fly, I thought maybe she had crawled through the queen excluder and was hiding in the wild comb. Of course we have no chance of finding her in that. She is certainly not laying as much, which is also standard procedure before a swarm.

Try finding a queen in this!

In the end we did the following:
First of all we destroyed all queen cells except for two.

This would have become a queen

We put one queen cell into the Star, together with three frames of bees, one queen cell into the nuc box, together with a frame of food and another frame of bees, plus some more shaken off a frame. I turned all entrances different directions and put grass into the entrances, so the bees would stay inside their new home for a day, to get used to their new surroundings. I destroyed all queen cells in the Moon, as I assumed, though invisible, that the queen was still in there. Then, in a fit of spleen, I put the wild comb onto the Star, too. In some way I think that should help me to find out where the queen is. If she is in the wild comb (and now in the Star), then there are too few bees there to swarm and she should kill the new developing queen and the Moon will raise a new emergency queen. If she is in the Moon, then the Moon might swarm, but there aren't that many bees left there, so they might not swarm (or do so later). Somehow, I am almost resigned to losing a swarm this year, but as long as I have two viable colonies at the end, I think I'll be happy.
I'm sure the bees will do everything differently, though. They always seem to.

The set up at the end; Star with wild comb, nuc and Moon

Throughout the inspection the bees were well-behaved and fairly calm. I was only stung once. The air was full of them though and half-way through the inspection I heard shrieks and screams from behind the hedge. Unsure of who was there and with not a lot I could do, I listened to the cries with some amusement. Someone was not having a good time with all the airborne bees. A few minutes later we saw the school's mountain-biking club emerge and pedal at top speed away from the environs of the apiary. The teacher in charge later told me they had been beset by bees, though not many had stung, it seems.