Queen Cell.

Having Demareed a bee colony last Friday, I had to return today to make sure all was in order and do a little follow-up work. I have never been able to find the queen and since all instructions for manipulations start off with the magic words, "First find the queen . . ." there is some creative beekeeping involved. Actually, there is never any real need to find her, there is always an alternative way of working; you can tell if she's healthy by looking at the colony as a whole. The first job is to make sure she is in the right box, the one underneath the queen excluder, if there are eggs and young brood there - then so is she.
Then you need to go through the top box, containing the bulk of the brood, and look for emergency queen cells; the bees looking after it are remote from the queen and often think that the colony is queenless. Emergency queens tend to be runts as they do not have such a good start in life and are malnourished (for queens). In the hard life of hive economics, the emergency queen cells are cut out and destroyed.

Operating a camera, while trying to keep a host of lively attendant bees away from their duties with a smoker for the sake of a blip is an interesting task. Were it not for the smoke the cell would be completely covered with workers, even with smoke there is not a clear view of the cell so, eventually I gave it a good blast to provide the inset picture. As you can see, it looks exactly like a peanut shell in texture, colour and size. The small "spur" on the lower, right hand end of it is where it was stuck to the adjacent comb.

I've just posted yesterday's blip, "Marooned."