This afternoon was bee inspection day. I was sure that the two colonies that had started to think about swarming last time round wouldn't have given up on the idea, and they hadn't, though nor had they swarmed. There were queen cells in both colonies, sealed and ready for the bees to go, but also eggs. That implied they weren't about to leave imminently, since the queen normally stops laying a few days before they do, and slims down ready for the flight. Or so the books say.
I was all prepared to swarm them artificially. I'd got the kit, and had even bought a little bottle of green water based queen marking paint. It came packaged in what looked remarkably like a nail varnish bottle, and quite probably was, since the queen marking paint market must be so small that nobody is going to manufacture special glass bottles for it. It's important to use the proper paint, and not nail varnish, since you need something that won't dissolve the chitin carapace of the insect, otherwise your poor queen will meet a grisly end. I used to have a queen marking pen, but like all seldom used felt tips, it had dried up by the time I needed it, and I thought the paint might last better.
I could not find the queen of either colony. I went through them each twice, very carefully, and they were remarkably good about it, but I simply could not see her. The queen is larger than a worker bee, but not so fat as a drone, with a long abdomen and long legs, and she tends to stride about purposefully on the comb. I looked and looked, moving my eyes across each brood frame inch by inch, and letting my attention flick round the edges in case I caught sight of her out of the corner of my eye. It's important to know where you are looking, or you can do what I've done in the past, which is to see the queen, but let your eye travel on and then not be able to find her again.
In the end they had been open for quite long enough, probably too long, though I remembered how long my bee tutor had allowed his colonies to remain open during lessons and tried not to worry about it. But I was worried that the brood would get cold, and the bees were getting agitated. All I could think of to do was to split the brood, moving the old box to a new position and putting the second box where the original was, so that the flying bees would return to the new box while the nurse bees remained with the brood in a new site, and I would split the bees between boxes as evenly as possible. The idea is that if they find themselves suddenly with fewer bees and less brood, this can be enough to change their minds about swarming, for the time being. It wasn't a very good idea, but as the CIA man says in Argo, it was the least bad idea I had. Of course it may be that they are merely trying to replace their old queens through supercedure.
It serves me right for having unmarked queens. All I can do is carry my green paint with me in future, and hope that eventually I see them and can mark them with a spot. At the end of all this animal husbandry I was quite drained, mentally and physically. I got back to the house to find that the Systems Administrator had been up to the apiary at one point to check that I was still alive, and not lying in a crumpled heap, a victim of anaphylactic shock. The poor old SA had fared worse than me, having gone out to the workshop to finish making up spare frames for me. It was a warm afternoon, the bees were flying, and soon found their way into the workshop, attracted by the smell of wax, and one stung the SA on the arm. I should have sorted out my supply of frames in the winter, or else the SA should have left frame making until a cold day. The first batch yesterday afternoon went fine, since it was chilly and the bees were not out and about.
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