Bee Mama Drama!

We got in the bees this morning... our goal was to confirm the presence of the queen in the 2-story Nuc so we can sell it, and also to find the queen in the newer Nuc (there were eggs last time, but we couldn't find the queen.)

In the 2-story Nuc, we saw a couple of capped queen cells and no eggs.  (Just last week there WERE eggs, and a couple empty cells, but we couldn't find the queen because they were so crowded so we couldn't sell it, and we put the second story on to give them more room.)  Hmmm.  Wonder what happened to the queen, but relieved they were raising a new one.

In the new nuc, I was able to locate the queen and got her into the queen catcher so we could clip her and mark her. 

Except.

She was ALREADY marked.  With a green dot (if you click on the pics above, they will enlarge and you can see the green on her).  Which means SHE was the queen from the OTHER nuc!!!  Now, green was last years queen color, but she is a new queen this year (This was the first queen we ever marked and clipped, and at the time didn't know what the 'bee' color of the year was.  Turns out, it's red.)

So, since the green was fading, we remarked her with pink, which is the closest-to-red paint marker we had.

Apparently they 'swarmed' from the original Nuc because they were too crowded.  But because she was clipped, she couldn't fly.  So she crawled back into the other Nuc and set up housekeeping, which means THAT'S now the one that is ready to sell.  We'll have to wait on the 2-story hive to be queen-right, and then it will be ready to go, as well.

Life is never dull when there are bees involved!