Bees

One of my hives still seems to be queenless, so on Saturday I took a frame with uncapped brood (and quite a lot of capped brood) in it from one of the other hives and transferred it to the queenless hive (replacing it in the "robbed" hive with a frame of store from the queenless hive). If the hive really is queenless the bees are meant to make a queen from one of the uncapped brood cells - so the bee books say, and looking back through my bee diary I find I did this successfully on several occasions in the 1990s. So when I check the hive at the end of the month there should be some brood in it. We'll see. While I was moving the frames there was a lot of agitation among the bees, and this was made worse because I took the opportunity to put wasp/mouse guards on the entrances, as there were a few wasps about. This always puzzles the bees at first, I find. But they soon settled down.