Laurence Edwards' nuc suddenly swarmed in September, leaving behind a virgin queen that had already flown away. He killed the virgin, merged the swarm back, and introduced a mated queen to save the colony before winter.
Where have all the bees gone? This was absolutely full to the brim of bees last week. Everything looks normal at the entrance. Oh, you little gits. They have swarmed and they've clustered up underneath the vented bottom. This was definitely not on today's agenda, clearing out swarms from overpacked nucs. What an absolute nightmare. A swarm in September. But luckily they've clustered up underneath this nuc. This is how I'm gonna fix it. I'm gonna shake the swarm into here. I think there'll be a virgin. I'm gonna find the virgin, fingers crossed, kill the virgin, merge everything back together again, and add a new queen. That is the plan. There we go, one virgin queen. So I know that looks a bit harsh. But that is the dead virgin queen. There is no way she's getting mated at this point in the year. What it means I can do now is it means that I can merge everything back together and put a brand new queen into position. Of course, the first thing I'm going to do is check the original colony and see if we've got a mated queen there. I'm suspecting there's going to be no mated queen in there though, and the bees just really got a bit confused late on in the year. So no brood, no eggs, no nothing. What I think happened is that I missed a queen cell when introducing the mated queens originally. The Killed my caged queen, and then that virgin underneath the box there has gone out on a mating flight, taken half the bees with her, and just decided to not come back in. So really, really simple fix. I'm just going to dump the little mini swarm back into this box, and I'm going to add in a brand new mated queen, and that should fix this colony going into winter. One mated queen ready to go. They're gonna access through that fondant there. Release the queen and this beehive will be fixed.
