No Queen... But Eggs?! What's Going On? #10

So, Zane, I've got a little bit of bad news, mate.

Not again.

Right. I have to get it right this time, otherwise my reputation is definitely on the line. But there is something that I didn't tell you at the beginning, Zane.

Ah.

Zane's first nuke, episode 10, and it is not going well. So, Zane, I've got a little bit of bad news, mate.

Go on.

We put a queen in there last week. Yeah, we went in, Zane's queen died, and we went in, we put a new queen in, we took down all the cells, and then we're coming back today, aren't we, to check to see if the queen's been released and see some eggs and see the queen. And I kind of went in halfway through the week just to double-check. I took the cage out, the cage was empty, but I can't find the queen.

Surely she could just be hiding. Like, no, surely not twice.

So she could be hiding. So she could be hiding. This is what we say to people, don't think that she's not there because she's hiding, but I think we need to go in. Should we get the smoker lit and we'll get in and see?

Not again, not again.

Right, okay, smoker time.

Yeah.

Right, so Zane, let's jump straight in. We've got our super that is untouched, which is good. It's quite Nothing in it, no bees. Feeder, have they taken the feed down?

They have, to be fair. There was about, yep, a good inch in there, wasn't there?

They've taken the majority of that feed down, which is really good. I'd be looking at this at this point thinking, oh, it's all going to plan, Zayn.

Yeah, yeah, and the weather's come back as well.

The weather's come back, that's the big thing, isn't it? The weather's come back, it's nice and sunny. Let's get the queen excluder off. Right, do you want to have a look inside, see? If the queen is in your cage.

So can I just pull the cage out as it is? Yeah, straight out like that.

Yeah.

We see him. There's no queen in there.

So this is what you're going to see when you take a cage out like that. You're generally just going to see a few bees knocking around, but you can see all of the fondant's gone, all of the tabs are still open. The queen is out. She's either in the colony alive or she is dead somewhere, and we're going to find out now. The thing is then, when I looked at that, when I got it out, I thought, yes, queen's out, brilliant, everything's good, and I was going through and looked through, yeah, I can't find her. So go on, should we give it a go? The queen is out somewhere, let's have a look, see if we can find her.

Um, she is marked, isn't she?

She will be marked the queen, yeah. Why'd you say that?

Oh, I didn't find her, sorry, your ears really perked up there. As a bit of a side note, I'm loving just picking up Frames of bees.

Yeah, enjoying it.

I was really sort of worried at the start, but.

So it's a worthwhile point to make. Zane just said it there. Like he's still enjoying it. He's still enjoying picking out the frames of bees. And I think for a lot of beginners, that's kind of what they're interested in. They're interested in going and getting their bees and having fun and just enjoying that time. And it is. It's nice, isn't it? It's nice and warm and sunny.

Yeah, especially in this weather.

Especially in this weather. Zane's enjoying himself. So whilst last week was a bit of a catastrophe and the queen died and we tried to replace her. still get all the nice benefits of beekeeping. And we will get this fixed. There's other problems that we need to sort out, but I promise you this, we will get it fixed and we will get it back on track. And not only will Zane be enjoying his beekeeping, he'll have some honey to show for it as well. So what are you seeing, Zane?

It's weird because they're still pretty relaxed compared to last week where you could tell. And obviously I was filming with Natasha the other day as well. And soon as her colony went queenless, you could see, and there was drones everywhere and they were quite aggressive. Yeah, these are still bringing in pollen and they seem relaxed.

It's a really astute observation, that is then. So what would you think is going on then?

I'm thinking the queen's in here somewhere.

Okay, so you think this colony is queen right? So it's a week later, the bees have taken down all that feed. We think there's a queen in here. What should we be seeing?

I'm not even looking. You're not looking for eggs? I'm just picking up frames of bees and going, oh, this is fun. Right, I need to be looking for eggs, right?

Cool, see if you can find any eggs.

Cool. I think mainly I'm just instantly looking for the queen.

So it's the eggs that are going to give you the clue as to whether that queen is definitely in there and laying. It's nice to be able to see the queen, but if I'm going back in and checking, I'll just go in, check to see if there's eggs there, close them back up, and all is good. I don't think there's any eggs in here. So we'll continue the search, but Zain's not found anything just yet. Right, Zane, have we found any eggs in here?

No eggs.

No eggs?

No.

Okay.

I'm afraid not.

What do you think of the state of the colony though, in terms of the frames and the stores and the pollen, compared to last week?

I feel like it's brimming compared to last week. Last week it was— they seemed like they were on their last legs.

Yeah, a dramatic improvement, yeah. And that will be as a result of the weather and them going out and getting a bit of pollen, but mainly because we fed them.

Yeah.

Like, that's the difference here. They're vibrant again and they've got the feed and they've got the stores in there and you can really see it, can't you?

Yeah, maybe that's why.

So no eggs at all. And I would say to people at this point, just close them back up, give them another week, and hopefully after a week you will see eggs. But there is something that I didn't tell you at the beginning, Xaine. So when I went in, I wanted to see if there was eggs. I wanted to see if the queen was there. And I found a queen in here and it was not the queen that we introduced.

Right.

You know what I said at the beginning about doing everything you possibly can to avoid having a virgin running around your hive in order for you to save it? Yeah, we're in that situation.

So is that— so was the virgin already there when we put our queen in?

So I'm not 100% sure. I'm not going to lie here because the timings of the cells weren't quite right. Remember when we looked at the cells and we said, is it swarming, is it supersedure, or is it emergency? We weren't really sure, were we? So I don't know where that queen's come from. And I don't know what, if she's a swarm queen or a supersedure queen or an emergency queen. I don't know how old she is, but she looks a bit runty. I have got in my pocket here, Zane, another queen. So we're going to do the introduction again and we're going to do the introduction again properly. We're going to find the existing queen. We're going to confirm that there are no other queens or cells available. And then I have got Splodge 2.0 in here. So this is a queen that's got a little bit of paint on her wing, but she'll be perfectly fine. And we're gonna requeen Zane's nuc successfully. I have to get it right this time, otherwise my reputation is definitely on the line, but I'm confident we can do it. So I've got your queen, Zane.

Yep.

First thing we need to do is find the virgin.

I mean, I've looked through and I've not spotted her just yet, but obviously she's not marked, so it takes a bit of a keen eye, doesn't it?

It does take a keen eye. So I'm gonna do my best to find her for you.

That's what I was hoping you was gonna say.

I'm gonna get you on the camera, and the only reason I'm not gonna say for Zane to do it at the same time is if we're both doing it, you can't kind of be sequential. I need to start here and work my way all along and make sure that I'm looking at every single frame. So if you want to grab that one, I'm going to go with this frame first and we will see how long it takes. Right, it's been like, what, 10 minutes or so? I've not found the queen yet. It does take a long, long time to find the queen, but I found something else, Zane, something that's quite promising, I'm not going to lie. Look at this frame here and try and get super close in around there and tell me what you see. So I've not found the queen, but take a look at this. I have found a frame of eggs. So what does this mean? It means that the queen that we put in last week was killed, and she was killed by the queen that was already in here. I didn't do the test. You should have come in, should have added a frame of eggs and done a test, really. Remember you saying that? Can we add the queen straight in now?

Right.

The belt and braces method would've been like waiting, adding a frame of eggs in and doing the test.

Yeah.

But we have a different challenge now, which is we don't have a queenless hive. We just have a colony where we don't know where the queen is. Do we want to keep this existing queen or do we want to replace her? And what are you thinking?

I'm not understanding what queen is in here. Is it our queen that we put in, the white-marked queen, or is this—

So we don't know yet.

Right.

We need to go through and find the queen that's there, and then we can make a decision. Should we do that?

That would be my opinion, yeah.

Right, let's do that. Ha!

You got her? Where, where, where? Oh yeah, yeah.

So we have found the queen. Not the queen that we introduced, not the marked one, but the queen that was clearly still in the hive. She looks really nice. The weather's been good. There's eggs everywhere. We're going to plan B. I'm not gonna kill that queen. I'm not gonna reintroduce anything. I think we are back on track. Right, Zane, you see how quick this queen is here?

Yes.

Very quick, yeah. So she is just freshly mated. She won't have been around long. I wanna mark her though. So I've got the white pen here. So don't do what everyone does, which is get your pen, take it out and go and plonk it on the queen and stick loads of paint all over her. That is not what we wanna do here. You do a few pumps there like that and then you wipe the nib Do this anywhere. I just want to get all that excess paint off. And then you know my way, Zane. I just come in from behind like that, a single dot, and she is deciding to walk up my hand. What's she doing that for? Chuck her back on there. There we go, one marked queen. Quick as that. But she's very much accepted. That is the colony's queen, and we're going to get her back inside now. Yeah, good. So we're back on track, Zane. I'm gonna push everything up. We've got a queen. Right, so queen is glued back on. What are you thinking next, feed or super?

Do they need feeding? They look pretty happy.

Whenever you ask yourself that, you can come in, give it a little lift, and then just make a decision based on lifting it. You only gotta get it up an inch. Feed or no feed?

That feels quite heavy.

It feels quite heavy. And that's it. Does it feel heavy, the box? And it's difficult and it's subjective, but it does. It feels heavy. I don't think they need any more feeding.

I can tell the difference between that and last week. Last week I could, it was a lot lighter.

So that is super useful, yeah, and I recommend everybody to do this. When you're feeding or when you're noticing that colony is light, heft it, feel it, weigh it before and after, and then you'll start to get that motor skill like Zane's got there where he says it's heavier than last week, and then you can use that to make the decision. I think Zane's made the right decision here. No more feeding, definitely not. Let's get the supers on, cross our fingers. But that can go on. Do you think that's enough space?

Yeah, because you can see there that there's loads.

Yeah, it's plenty of space. If you went ahead at this time of the year and stuck 2 on, it wouldn't be the end of the world. But I think we're kind of babying this colony a bit, trying to get it back up. So we'll just leave it with one, yeah?

Yeah, no, I'm cool with that.

So we've got the remnants of all the syrup out of there, feeder back on, everything's closed, lid in place. But we forgot to do one thing, Xane. We introduced the queen to another colony, didn't we?

Oh yes, the one up there.

Yeah, and I've not gone and checked that one. Should we go and have a look before we finish up?

Let's do it.

These bees were very angry with us last week, remember?

Yes.

Because it was miserable and it's a lot nicer today, so hopefully they're a bit more friendly. When you're looking for queens as well, good tip, a lot of people do this, yeah, they get the smoker lit and they'll kind of go to look for their queens and the first thing they do is like they're puffing all smoking and stuff and it just makes the queens run away. It's impossible to find them. What do you think, Zane?

They look alright.

How chilled are they?

Yeah.

I'm gonna go risky. Like, look at the difference.

It's crazy, innit?

Yeah. And the difference here is as simple as this: they've accepted a queen. Like, you can tell just from looking in that the queen from this cage is now walking around. So I'll have a look.

Very confident, very confident.

I really am, and obviously you'll always get ones that aren't that, but see just how they're coordinated. Yeah, they're there, they're doing their thing. Nice weather as well. I'd be, I'd be amazed if she wasn't accepted into this one. And there we go, just like that. I knew this one was going to be okay, Zane. You can just tell. The weather played a little part in making them calmer, but this is the difference between being queenless and queen right. Right, so that's it. 2 colonies. They've both got queens now. They've both got eggs. They've both got sunshine. They've got everything they need apart from one really important thing, Zane.

Go on.

We will find that out in episode 11. I think it's time for the bloopers.

Yeah, that's not bad, that. Hello.

Zayn's burning the tips of the mics now. Not great, is it? It's fine. It's like—

yeah, yeah.

The infamous 7th attempt closing trick that never works. Do you want to come in closer? We're both standing here really awkward like that.

Like, right, I'm in my 30s now. The hairline's not as strong as it used to be.

I think the right decision here is Zayn— I think Zayn— I just talk way too much. I'm gonna go to there. Ready? That worked well.

Sorry, my acting wasn't turned on. Right, I got it.