Into the hive they go

After leaving the bees in their nuc for for 3 days, with a contact feeder placed above a hole in the crownboard in an eke I'd knocked together just for the occassion, I decided it was time to pop them into the hive. My plan was simple, just open the nuc and the hive and move the frames from one to the other quickly and with no fuss. So having put one shallow and five deep Commercial frames into the hive I them opened the nuc and started transferring the frames over. There was loads of brood in there and I also spotted two big fat queen cells two thirds of the way up one frame. As every new beekeeper gets told these need to be cut out to prevent swarming so cut them out I did. I closed up the hive and felt fairly pleased with myself for having thwarted the first attempt to swarm.

I hadn't seen the queen or inspected the brood for eggs but felt she was bound to be in there somewhere. Anyway as you may recall I'm using a Commercial brood box, however the bees were on National deep frames. The National frames are a bit smaller so what tends to happen is the bees make a lot burr comb in the space that's left making it difficult to manage the hive. The simple way round this is to attach some wood to the sides of the National frame to pad it out to the size of a Commercial frame. So I made some frames and drilled holes in them so I could quickly cable tie them in place (one tie on each end at the top and one at the bottm in the middle. I then opened up the hive a few days later and installed them -which would have been a lot easier if only I'd had three arms rather than the more traditional two..

The cable ties visible are from my National to Commercial adapters

Whilst adding the frame adapters I had a a good opportunity to look at the comb contents. I could see a lot of capped brood still but no uncapped brood and no queen. Uh oh. I was using a contact feeder on top the hive using one of the National brood bodies as an eke for the first couple of weeks. When I next inspected the hive I still didn't see any queen and no eggs or uncapped brood. Plenty of syrup was being stored though and lots of pollen was being brought in. I decided to stop feeding for a week in case the reason for the lack of eggs was that the bees were filling every cell with syrup but on my next inspection I found this wasn't the case so resumed feeding. I suspect that the queen who was marked according to the documentation had either left the hive in a cast swarm immediately before I purchased it or immediately after I got it home whilst I was at work, however the nuc was still visibly crammed with bees when I opened if so it may have been that they had balled her due to overcrowding. Either way the two supersedure cells I'd cut would have probably been enough to correct the problem when one of the queens was hatched and mated. Shame I'd gone and cut them out then.