Queen Cells everywhere Captain. What to do!
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Welcome back to Beekeepers Diary podcast. We are on the 19th of April now, 2026, and I'm being investigated by Grumpy Bees.
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I'm hoping they'll get bored and leave me alone soon. I think I'm going to call today's episode Queen Air. What's Armageddon with Queens? Queenageddon? Something like that. It's been what I would describe as an interesting visit. Two weeks ago, so 14 days ago.
00:49
I got to do my first inspection of my new colony which was on a commercial brood box with a super on top then the queen excluder and then the supers for honey on top of that so I prefer to keep him one brood box and today has only confirmed my desire to do that em so when I inspected two weeks ago I found
01:18
charged queen cells so I took the old queen out put her in a nuke with some brood and some food and some spare frames. There's my banker which is fine and I was going to go back last weekend to em reduce the queen cells in the old hive down to one or two and let them raise a new queen but last week the weather was horrendous.
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so I couldn't get in. So I decided to leave it for today.
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which would be day 14, which is cutting it close because the queen comes out on day 16. And I wanted to get there before that happened. So we've come along today to go through the boxes and I've gone through the super, which is on top of the brood box, which is also part of the whole brood em laying pattern. And sure enough,
02:23
there are queen cells, so we were happily marking the queen cells to decide which ones we're going to take. I could hear piping, which is a sound queens make when they're close to emerging or emerged and they know there's another queen in the hive, so it's quite a fun sound to hear. And then I found some queen cells that were split.
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cracked in the middle. So what I think has happened is the queen cells were on between the super and the brood box and when I've removed those super frames they've split the queen cells and I think we've released four or five queens into this hive on probably on day 14-15 a day early so
03:19
Normally I'd have one queen cell and an orderly handover of power, but I think we've got at least four virgin queens in that hive who will have to go on the rampage and decide who's going to take over and reign. So not how I choose to do it. Hopefully they don't all kill each other and I'm left with none. But over the next few days, there's going to be a lot of queen tooting.
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queen murdering and hopefully not four swarms. We shall see. So not how I choose to do it, but there we are. And on top of that, the queens have made close to 20 queen cells as well.
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So we've had to go through all the frames, take out all those extra queen cells so we don't have 24, 25 queens on the rampage. So that's never fun having to remove queen cells and dispatch those. um And obviously that really upset the bees. I'm not convinced with these bees temperament myself anyway, they're quite followy. So I'm still here.
04:43
I don't know, 15 meters from the hive and they're still coming over to check me out from time to time. And it took a five minutes for them to leave us alone enough for my wife to go back to the car to not bring the bees with her back to civilised society. So yeah, that was quite eventful. So now we've got a nuke, which has got stores bringing in nectar. Here's another bee come to check me again. Yeah, I'm still here.
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em and she has started laying in that nuke so that's good. Then we've got a brood box and a super of queens and brood and I've got three supers on top of that, two which are full of nectar so I've added a third.
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um So yeah, good nectar collection. Hopefully they'll requeen over the next month and everything can calm down.
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beautiful sunny day.
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Yeah, fingers crossed for see what the hell the next few weeks are going to bring.
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So quite an exciting visit today.
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Yeah, wishing you all the best and catch up with you next week.