Neils
Head Scratcher
by
, 04-06-2010 at 12:01 PM (5262 Views)
Well, I think my Nuc has gone from virgin queen to swarmed in about 6 days.
I will admit to placing a test frame in it last thursday, I'm also absolutely adamant that this frame had no queen cells on it as it came out of the 14x12 and was on standby in case the 14x12 was showing signs of trying to swarm again so I could get the queen out into another Nuc (my Nucs are standard National at the moment) so it'd already been checked once to ensure it had no queen cells on it and I checked it again before putting it in the Nuc.
But 7 days suggests I somehow missed it over two separate inspections last week.
I'm not 100% convinced I didn't just miss the queen as there were plenty of eggs in the Nuc but having gone over every frame 4 times I'm going with the likelyhood that she might have gone although there wasn't a noticeable reduction in quantity of bees.
I opened the sealed queen cell as there were two more uncapped with young larvae just to make sure there was actually something in it and I'm going back on sunday after I've moved the 14x12 to recheck it, if there's no eggs on sunday my brand new queen definitely buggered off
If there's an upshot, at least it was the Nuc that swarmed and not the 14x12. I can cope with the Nuc being queenless for another couple of weeks, but if I missed it then I would obviously have missed it and lost a prime swarm from the 14x12 which I suspect might well have been a bit more noticeable.
I bet keeping wasps isn't as stressful.