Spot the queenless colony

Spot the queenless colony.

Saturday’s fine weather gave the opportunity to open up my colonies for the first time this season.

All but one of the nine colonies came though winter well (and two are about to be given away).

Can you tell which colony was queenless? It’s the one on the left. On inspection its bees were behaving quite normally. They were strong in numbers, bringing in pollen, calm on the comb, but there wasn’t any sign of eggs, larvae or sealed brood – not even a drone-laying worker. Most odd! I suspect the queen finally ran out of steam just one month ago.

On closing up the hive, they weren’t quite as interested in what had just happened as the bees of the queen-right colonies.

And here below is a lonely boy. The only drone I spotted all day:

Turlough
Vita’s Guest Beekeeper Blogger