The Remains of the Queen Cell.

I may have mentioned it before, but the Tyro has a little -problem with his original bee colony; the population is dwindling and there is no sign of any queen. I gave him a queen cell to introduce and all seemed well for a while but today, when we did an inspection, all that remained was the silver foil used to protect the pupating queen from excessive attention from the bees. Normally a queen would make a trap-door at the bottom of the cell for her to escape, or the bees would open the cell at the side to remove and kill her. My money is on the latter having happened. The colony has already rejected a mated queen.

However, the lad has a viable colony headed by one of my old queens so he should still be a bee keeper at the end of the year.

As I write this on Friday the 13th of July, I have news these bees now have the much desired mated queen. There is an ongoing argument discussion on what precisely is going on as these bees have seen three queens over the course of spring/summer this year. The most likely possibility is that the original queen has always been there, with the workers, for whatever reason, not allowing her to lay. My reasoning is that I have seen this happen in three different colonies this year, each one with a different bee keeper and in a different apiary; with my own colony, there was only one possibility since I made no attempt at queen introduction.