Succession

We have had a pretty heavy day of beekeeping. I hear that a couple of MPs have resigned, but I haven't really caught up with the detail. If it's important it will probably be in the morning paper

We have a colony that is doing something called 'supersedure'. This is something the British have indulged in from time to time over the centuries: kill the monarch and install a replacement that you hope will do a better job. We still do it, in a metaphorical sense, to prime ministers. Rather than actually killing them, it is understood that they will toddle off and make a fortune in business or making after-dinner speeches or devoting their life to good works. Above all, they must not hang around making life difficult for their successors

Supersedure in a hive happens when the colony decides it wants to replace its queen without going through all the rigmarole of swarming, splitting the colony in two, finding a new home etc. In this case the queen has been around since 2020; her rate of lay is dropping off; the concentration of the pheromones that she releases to signal her presence is diminishing; the colony want a younger model

A swarming colony raises a dozen or more new queens - to do their best to make sure one of them is a success. A superseding colony, on the other hand, creates just two or three queen cells, because they still have the backup of the old queen if it all goes wrong. In our case, they created two cells and have already destroyed one of them, so a single queen cell is in the hive waiting to emerge, then mate, then start laying

While all this goes on, the old queen keeps on laying to keep the colony going. It is not impossible that two queens will live side-by-side for a while, both laying eggs. Eventually, certainly before winter, the colony will kill the old queen

That was the first hive of the day. The next one surprised us by being in full swarming mode. The surprise is because this queen is brand new: hatched this year and only been laying for two or three weeks. This is not supposed to happen - new queens settle down for the rest of the season and only want to swarm after their first winter - all the books say so

This queen is so new - in a very strong, large colony - that we have never yet seen her, never mind marked her with a high-viz spot, to make her easier to find. We spent quite a while trying to find her, but failed. The picture shows one of the techniques we tried. Queens shy away from the light so, if you arrange frames in pairs in this way, the chances are she will slip into the darkness between one of the pairs. MrsM takes out one frame in the pair, I take out the other one at the same time, and we examine the inner faces. We have had a lot of success with this in the past, but not today

Instead, we are carrying out another swarm control technique that is rather long-winded and spread over two days (but does not rely on actually finding the queen) - too much to fully cover at the end of an already long blip. We will return to the apiary to finish it tomorrow, just as soon as I've finished reading the paper