Where Is My Supersedure Queen??

The last time I was in this hive, my favorite queen, Splodge, was being superseded. Let's get inside and see if she's still there. When I found out that Splodge was being superseded, I was a little bit gutted. Splodge is a queen that was sent to me and she was covered in paint. Paint on her head, paint on her thorax, paint down the side, paint on her wing, paint on her legs. I couldn't sell her to anyone because obviously she was covered in paint, so I had to do something with her. I put her in this hive. She started doing really well. Recovering a failing drone-laying colony. But unfortunately, after a few weeks, they decided to supersede her. And the reason that I know that was that there was a single cell on the edge of the brood nest, and coincidentally, it was on the face of the frame as well. Definite supersedure. That was about 2 and a half weeks ago. So what we should be seeing today is an emerged supersedure cell and at least one queen in this colony, possibly 2. Let's get inside, see what we can see. So we've still got a decent-sized colony in there covering the majority of the frames. I've condensed this hive down, as I have with most of the hives in this apiary, to a single brood box, single Langstroth brood box on 9 frames. Let's open it up and let's see if we can find Sploge. So first thing to see is we've got a good amount of capped worker brood. I reckon that brood there has been laid by Sploge, but there's no eggs being laid in there either. That is a sign that something is slightly wrong, and it does lead me to believe that we might not find Sploge in here. I hope we do, but the fact that we've got capped worker brood that's not surrounded by eggs, not a good start. start. However, that is on the edge of the brood nest, so maybe as we work towards the middle we'll find some eggs, and then fingers crossed Sploge is still there. Now I should probably park the sentiment to one side really, because what's the actual best outcome that I've got here? The best outcome is that Sploge isn't there and the supercedure queen is mated. That's the best outcome. The second best outcome is the supercedure queen is mated and Sploge is still there hanging on. They'll take 2 queens into winter, and then obviously Sploge kind of goes off and does her own thing. We won't go into what's going to happen to Sploge. The worst scenario is that Sploge isn't there and there There's no other queen there at all, or the other queen failed to mate and she turns into a drone-laying queen. We don't even want to think about that. Now, I've had lots of lovely comments on social media saying you want to save Splodge, and it's a really nice sentiment, but when a colony is superseding like that, there is something wrong with that queen. So I'm not going to split this colony off here and make a nuc to the detriment of this colony. What I want to do is I want to save that entire colony there, and if I start splitting off a little nuc with Splodge in, which is almost certainly going to fail over winter, I risk taking the main colony down with me as well. So although I'd love to do that, I'm not going to do that. Let's carry on though. Let's go through. Let's see what we can see. So next frame in. Very, very interesting. Again, lots of perfect capped brood. Remember, this colony here was a failed drone-laying queen. The last time we went in, there was tons of drones knocking around everywhere. There was loads of spotty brood. So who has laid up that beautiful capped brood? It can only be one queen. It is definitely Sploge. Even better though, Lots and lots of eggs in the middle, and I have to say I suspect the cat brood I think is splodge. The eggs I think is the new unmarked superceder queen. Beautiful frame of brood in all stages. That is what we want to see. Very happy with that, and I think the majority of the brood there is going to be raised by that new queen. Unless splodge has just gone on a last hurrah and she is going out fighting. But that really is a beautiful frame. Lots and lots of eggs and. Tons of larvae in there. So not as many eggs on this one here, but a good amount of brood still. Still no sign of either queen though. I've not specifically been looking for that unmarked queen, so she might have popped up on a frame and I've just not seen her yet. But I will go back through and double-check before I find Splodge. Well, this is going to make a lot of people very, very happy indeed. Look who we found! We have found Splodge! So the fact that Splodge is still in here Maybe she has laid all of that brood. I just don't know. There's no reason why she hasn't. She was laying tremendous brood before they tried to supersede her, and she is still there now, and she is still going strong. So that's excellent news. I'm really, really happy with that, Splodge. Well done. But look here, I've just found a cell over in that corner and didn't really think anything of it. I thought that's just going to be a play cup, but it is in fact full of royal jelly, and there is a larva in it as well. So they're having Another go at supersedure. We'll take a look through and see if there's any more cells in here, but they're not swarming. It's not the right time of the year for them to be swarming, and we're only ever seeing one queen cell at a time. Very, very strange. But that definitely is another supersedure cell. I'll see if I can get you a close-up here. It's just in this corner here, edge of the brood nest again in terms of its proximity to the edge of the frame, and it is slap bang in the middle, just around there. I've opened it up and there is a larva in there, so I'm not taking it down. I'm going to let these bees do exactly what they need to do. So far though, we've got brood, we've got splodge, and we've got another supercedure cell. We've not found the old supercedure queen and we've not seen any other cells just yet. Another nice frame of brood. Not too many eggs in it, but plenty of worker brood. And you can see we're like 10 weeks past when this colony was a drone layer now, and there's hardly any drones in here and there is zero drone brood. So we've got them back on track in terms of that dwindling away with the colony going drone laying. And then the final frame that we've got here, few more drones hanging out on this frame. Couple of bits of drone brood still remain on there, but no supersedure queen. How strange is that? So I'm going to track back through now. I want to find first the frame where there was a supersedure queen, see if there's any sign that the supersedure queen has come out, or see if there's any sign that they've taken down that cell. And then I will have a track back all the way through and see if we can find that supersedure queen. Right, so there is the supersedure cell right in the middle of that frame towards the top. It's just up there. I'll give you a close-up on it, but it does look like the bees have started to chew away, and I can't see any obvious signs of a queen emerging. That doesn't mean the queen hasn't emerged. Sometimes the queen can emerge, she chews her way out, goes, and then the bees are taking down the cell, and it looks like they're trying to take it down kind of before the queen's emerged. But in fact, the queen has emerged and then they're just taking it down to recycle the wax. I'll give you a closeup of that now. So you can see there, there is a hole at the top. Maybe the queen has emerged. It was a nice dimpled cell, but they have started chewing away from the side as well, which indicates that they were trying to take it down. You just can't tell from this whether that was before or after the queen emerged. We will go and have a look though and see if there is a queen. I'll just track back through all of those frames, see if I can find her. I cannot see any other queens in that hive, but Sploge lives to fight another day. They're doing another supersedure cell, so I will come back in another couple of weeks just to check what's going on, see if they finish the cell, see if that cell's emerged. It's getting a bit late in the year now, but still, the bees know best when it comes to supersedure. You can safely let them supersede even in poor weather, and if the new supersedure queen is a dud, they'll just revert back to the old one going into the winter. They won't leave themselves in a worse situation than just keeping themselves with splodge.