Beekeeping Exhibition.

I'm posting this a week late, there is a lot of catching up to do but today’s entry is part of a story.
 
Today I had a small beekeeping exhibition at our community café which will be repeated next Saturday ; it was quite successful in that several people were very interested and spent a long time asking questions and chatting. There were, of course, no bees there but the wooden hive has  photographs inside illustrating the activities you would expect to see there; not particularly good ones, particularly at the price charged for them, but I was the only person unhappy with the quality.
 
Afterwards, I met Tyro at my apiary for a lesson, her mission being to inspect the colony whose queen I had removed last week. She didn’t know the history but quickly realised that the queen was missing and for how long. Apart from there being no eggs or young brood, the bees were flying vigorously but without any organisation; while it is difficult to describe, when you’re familiar with the normal behaviour, the divergence from the norm is obvious. Then there were lots of queen cells (containing pupating queens), though they could have been due to the colony preparing to swarm if Her Ladyship had been there.
 
T still has much to learn in the six weeks before her exam, during the examination she managed to damage the best of the Queen cells through clumsiness, it didn’t actually matter as, having assessed the situation she had to remove them  all anyway. The colony is not a good one and so I don’t want any of its genes remaining in the apiary. We then selected a frame with eggs in the other colony and shook the bees from it back into the donor hive before putting it in the middle of the brood nest of the queenless one. The bees there will make some new queen cells using the donated eggs and I’ll come back next week for the next stage in the process.