It's been a little while since my last post. I wanted to come to you with great news from the hive, of Peggy, our new queen laying away and bringing up lots of happy bee babies. Not so my friends, not so.
We chose a method of requeening the hive, where we placed Peggy into a little cage that was blocked with food at one end. The clever idea is, you place her on a frame in the brood box where all the laying takes place. In the time it takes her to eat through the food and go waddling off round the hive to start her reign, the bees will have gotten used to her pheromones and won't bump her off as an impostor.
So she was put in and left to munch away to her heats content. Kind of like a woman in a room full of cake.
But on the next inspection, she was gone. There was no sign of her on the frames and there were no eggs to speak of. So it looks like she emerged and the current hive turned on her. Poor Peggy! I'm gutted for her, I feel like we sent he to her death to face 60000 murderous bitches. Can you imagine?!
So we are back to square one. We have another queen arriving soon and hopefully we will have more success this time round. However, if they continue to act like she devils then we will move on to plan B. Which I will of course blog about should it happen. In the mean time, here is a link to a great song in memory of Peggy, queen of our Vic though short! http://youtu.be/HELofmbpDM0
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