66 Looking for a queen

One hive was split in three. In one of the splits was the queen. Then the two new hives were exchanged with splits from the hives in Belfarset. That left me with three hives. The hives might harbour a queen in every one of them or no queen at all. In the hives without a queen the worker bees had to get busy choosing a larvae to raise as a queen. This larvae then got fed on Royal Jelly to form her into the new queen. To be on the save side the worker bees would feed more than one larvae the Royal Jelly. And Timothy was counting on that when he called again after a week. If there was more than one queen pod in the same hive but on different frames he could split the hive again. In The Secret Garden he had been lucky. He got three splits from four hives. In our apiary the first hive he opened had no queen but several queen pods on one frame only. No possible split there. As soon as the first Virgin Queen would come out of her pod, she would go to check for others. When found she would knock on the pod and if there was a response she would open the pod and kill the rival queen. Then after a couple of days in which she established her position as queen, she would fly out to mate. The second hive Timothy opened had already a queen. He saw that on the first frame he took out. Not the queen herself but as he showed me there were tiny little rice like forms in the combs eggs that had just been laid. He did not want to take a split from this hive, because the split could be too week. On the third and last hive he struck lucky. There were queen pods on different frames. He transferred the frame to a prepared Styrofoam starter hive. Good luck to them! (66 Looking for a queen 03-06-16)