bzzzzzzzzzz: 2011-10-23 Payday

Today I found out a few things:

- The (first) swarm from Metropolis, the one that I sucked out of the banksia with the swarmbuster....is dead, or good as.

- Metropolis itself is going fine,

- The other has no queen, but loads of honey....

First Metropolis, below....

I love the way they pack the cells in, here you can see a whole lot of (larger) drone-sized cells in the middle, how do they get them to fit in amongst the smaller worker cells?
Quite a bit of honey in Metropolis, but not the 70% capped type that you harvest.....you need at least 70% capped, so that the uncapped stuff (nectar) does not dilute the honey. If there is too much nectar (or conversely not enough sugar), the honey can go off...

Metropolis with the honey supers off

The front door. Pretty calm, considering I was dismantling their house...

Down in the brood box

Grubs ahoy , which mean there is a queen in there, or at least there was a week ago when the eggs were laid.

Last swarm was a week ago (17th), so there is a queen in there. I think.

Not a lot of grubs, either, but I think this is a queen just starting to lay. I hope.

Meanwhile, in the first swarm box....

Heaps, and heaps, and heaps of drone cells.

Apparently when there is no queen, the the workers themselves lay eggs, but because they are unfertilised, they are all drones, and the hive is doomed. weird biology going on.

more drones

and more drones

You can tell by the dome-capped cells, Ian Brown calls then 'bullet head' cells.

This confirms that the queen did not survive the Swarmbuster. Tried it twice, got lots of bees both times, but both times the queen did not make it. Not sure I'll try it again.

I reckon I'll just let this one die out. No point uniting it or re-queening, there are too many drones in there for it to be any use, I think.

I wonder how long they can last without a queen?

And, over to the Other, I need to get a queen in there (from my check last week), so I decided I'd unite the Other with the swarm that I got out of the tree last week. Pretty sure there's a queen in there, so I hope it works....