Both hives now queenright

I inspected both hives yesterday. The super (or 'honeybox' if you like) on Hive1 is a good two thirds full so I've ordered a new one to add because they're going to need more space for honey -that's a good thing. On the other hand it means I'd better learn how to extract and deal with honey soon which I hadn't expected to need to know till next year. The super on Hive1 is actually a national sized brood box in fact which is a lot bigger that a proper super, and now there's loads of honey in there it's seriously heavy. Luckily I'm fit as a butcher's dog 8-) so I can still lift the thing but I really wouldn't want to carry it far.

Anyway I was half way through checking the frames in the brood box (brood box = the bottom box of the hive, the bit where the eggs get laid and bees get raised)  when I spotted the queen. As anyone will tell you the queen bee looks different to the other bees and she's bigger. But let's be honest folks: she doesn't look *that* much different and she's not *that* much bigger and spotting the one *slightly* different bee out of 50-60,000 other bees isn't easy.

That's one of the reasons bee keeper's tend to catch the queen and put a blob of paint on her back. It's far easier to spot the one with a splot of blue or red paint on her than it is to spot the slightly bigger and possibly possibly paler or maybe darker one. The colour you use depends on the year here's a chart of what colour to use for what year. The colours are green, blue, white, yellow and red. Yes somebody thought a blob of yellow paint would make a particular bee easier to spot amongst a few thouand bees running around wax of various shades of yellow.I've never seen a queen bee in this hive before, except the one I put in in her cage end even her never since that day, so I grabbed my queen catcher (plastic clip cage thing) and snapped a picture of her with my, by then, slightly sticky camera phone and here it is:

Hive1 Queen Bee

This was the first colony I bought and had turned out to be queenless so I'd added a white marked queen I'd purchased later. You'll notice that this queen doesn't show any white paint. I'm pretty sure that's not her. What probably happened was the queen I added got released by the bees, started laying eggs then the bees decided to raise a new queen of their own and either she or they then killed her. They're nice like that (more on honey bee politics in a later post.)  That's often the way it goes with requeening tho: the bees know what they want from their queen whereas a queen supplier will ship out every mated queen they have. As you can see she is a little bit different to the rest but imagine trying to spot her amongst this lot:

National frame with commercial adaptor

-and that's one of 11 frames with two sides each, so you're looking for her in that x22. I didn't find the queen in Hive2 today but I was relieved to find eggs are now being laid so I know there is one in there. I had suspected they'ed raised a new queen and was wondering how long it'd take for her to get mated. No new brood in there though so she's only started laying within the past 3 days. Whilst I was in Hive2 I pulled out one of the national frames which was full of honey and replaced it with a new commercial frame.