The black cat wasn't about when I got up. This was mildly worrying, in that we didn't see him yesterday evening either, and he is normally around. He used to be a wanderer in his younger days, which is how he got shot, but he is an old boy now, with a gammy leg, keen on his several small meals a day, and doesn't generally get further than the middle of the turning circle or the concrete parking area, where he snoozes. I peered into some of his favourite spots in the gravel and looked in the shed, calling his name, but without conviction. Cats disappear into the scenery as seamlessly as members of the Viet Cong into the Mekong delta, unless they want to be found. I told myself that it was very warm weather, and if the cat wasn't feeling hungry or sociable then he could easily choose to stay outside.
I lit the bee smoker with a vague sense of ill luck. The cat had disappeared, and so probably had half the bees. There was a stiff little breeze, and it took several scrunched up envelopes and half a dozen matches to get the smoker to go. One stray Chinese lantern was enough to start the Great Fire of Smethwick, but there was I trying as hard as I could to set fire to some torn paper and hessian scraps in a purpose-built metal cylinder with integral bellows and under-grate ventilation, and it wouldn't take. Eventually the smoker was burning to my satisfaction, and the black cat suddenly appeared, looking as though he'd just popped out for five minutes and could fancy some breakfast now.
Conditions weren't great for a bee inspection. It was warm enough, and dry, but overcast so that it was going to be difficult to see if there were eggs in the cells of the brood nest. The lettuce workers had chosen today to do something in the field just over the hedge from the beehives, and I try not to open the hives when other people are around, just in case. I was feeling stiff and out of sorts. I considered leaving it until later, or another day, but I'd gone to all that trouble lighting the smoker, and more to the point the inspection was three days late already.
Time seemed to have been suspended when I opened the hive with the golden bees. They were still making the play cups that are the first sign of swarming, but without the queen laying eggs in them, so they were not yet serious about it. After thinking I saw an egg in the worker brood comb in one of the first frames I checked, and cursing the bad light, I definitely saw eggs in one of the last, so the queen was present in the colony and doing her job. The bees seemed to have brought in no more honey than when I was last there ten days previously.
The top super on the colony of dark bees still had honey in it, which was encouraging. If they'd swarmed they'd have taken that with them. However, again they didn't seem to have done anything much since last time. There was barely any more honey, and they still hadn't finished putting wax cappings over what they had collected. Given the fine weather I'd thought they'd have been busier than that. Perhaps it has been so hot that the nectar flow has dried up. The brood box looked pretty full of bees, again suggesting they hadn't swarmed yet, but when I began to examine the individual frames I found a queen cell on the first one, and plenty more as I went through the hive. Once bees have made a queen cell, containing a grub that will develop into a new queen bee, and sealed it up, they are ready to swarm as soon as the mood strikes them. Some of these queen cells were not yet sealed, but some were.
I'd decided in advance that if they were making queen cells, but had not yet swarmed, on this occasion I was going to destroy the queen cells. That is not the best method of swarm control. Destroying the evidence of swarming only addresses the bees' behaviour, not the underlying cause of it, and so they will probably go on preparing to swarm while you are still putting your smoker away. There is the risk that you fail to spot just one queen cell, in which case they can go ahead and swarm anyway. I looked at each frame very carefully, and then as the bees were in a remarkably good mood I checked each again, and found one cell the second time round that I'd missed the first time. However, the bees could have been standing on a cell both times and hidden it from me, or there could have been a second strange rogue cell like the one I found tucked in flat under the bottom of the comb. The books say to shake the bees off every comb, but I didn't do that. It makes them very irritable, and I had to think about the lettuce farm workers just over the hedge, who were busily banging spikes into the ground as they set up the irrigation system for a new batch of just-planted lettuce plugs. Nor did I feel up to working in the middle of a cloud of seriously annoyed bees. Finally, there is the risk that you got it wrong and the bees have already swarmed, in which case you are destroying their replacement queen, and without the means to make another they will eventually die. I thought I'd take that risk, since on the basis of the intact stores and volume of bees present I didn't believe they'd swarmed, and if the worst came to the worst I had other colonies that could provide a queen.
I didn't attempt a better method of swarm control because I didn't feel up to it. I wasn't entirely well, the light was bad, and I thought my chances of finding the unmarked queen were poor. Destroying the queen cells should give me another week before they'll be ready to try again, as long as I didn't miss any, by which time I should be feeling better. Sometimes gaining yourself time is the best you think you can do. I must mark my queens next season.
The next time you see a jar of honey in a farm shop and think that five pounds is a lot of money for one jar of the sweet stuff, think of all the efforts that some beekeeper has made, just getting to the point of having a honey crop to harvest. Though with the weather the way it has been there won't be much again this year, and there aren't many entries for our honey competition at The Tendring Show.
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