What on earth are you doing up there?

Saturday; the weather was forecast to be fine, so today's plan was to mow the lawn and, once the day warmed, inspect the hives. This is fast becoming the norm for a lockdown weekend.

The turf was soon clipped and I then headed over to Kathy's cottage with a car stuffed with beekeeping paraphernalia.*

My main objective was to relocate the shook swarm from their six frame nucleus hive to a National Brood box. The National Brood holds eleven frames and will give the colony almost twice the space it had in the "nuc".  Hopefully this will assuage its swarming tendency. I soon had the bee covered frames transferred to the larger hive, although I failed to see the queen during the procedure. I then went through the other two colonies and both are doing reasonably well. I needed to remove a few queen cups and they are likely to need additional supers if this warm spell continues.

Back at home, I made a start on three of the four hives in the garden.** All was as to be expected until I reached the smaller of the colonies. I took a look at a couple of frames in the super to see how much nectar was being stored and was surprised to see large patches of worker brood.

Now the occasional few drone cells at the bottom of the frames are to be expected, as the workers will relocate drone eggs from the brood box up in to the super, but solid patches of worker brood suggested that the queen had managed to make her way up through the queen excluder.

It took me two searches of the super's frames before I found her, returned her to the brood box and reassembled the hive. I am now wondering whether I have a small queen that can fit through the bars of a queen excluder or whether this recently acquired excluder has an oversized mesh?

The aim of a queen excluder is to ensure that the stores of honey and the developing bee larvae are kept separate. This is because no beekeeper wants brood contaminating their honey crop. The brood in the super is not a major problem this early in the season as the eggs and larvae will complete their development in no more than 21 days.

I just hope she doesn't make her way back up their again.

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* Keeping Bees involves a fair bit of planning, especially if the hives are away from your equipment store. I had a mental list of everything I was likely to need and still managed to forget syrup for the shook swarm.
** The hive from which produced the shook swarm will be left for four or five weeks before being inspected. This should be sufficient time for the queen cell to hatch, the queen to have her mating flights and start laying in the hive.