Where's Queenie?

I've been waiting for an opportunity to open up the hive and have a good look following the MAQs treatment. We've had lots of dry weather but temperatures have been too low. It needs to be at least 16˚c to safely open the hive and not chill the brood. Last Saturday the forecast looked perfect so l packed my trug and set off.

Lots of bees was a good sign that none had swarmed.

My main concern was swarming and it was reassuring to see a large number of bees in the hive, it was looking a little overcrowded so I wasn't surprised to see queen cells on the second frame I removed. There were sealed queen cells on a number of frames and I felt that I may need to carry out an artificial swarm to prevent them from swarming naturally and thus losing half my bees.

However there was no sign of the red queen (the 2013 queen marked with red paint) and after a thorough look on all of the frames I concluded that she was no longer there. There was no sign of any eggs either so I guess she hadn't been there for a while. I couldn't do an artificial swarm without a queen so I left all of the queen cells and closed up the hive after adding a few new frames.

On my next visit the new queen should have emerged and I will need to find and mark her (she will be green because she is a 2014 queen). Hopefully she will have had a successful mating flight and be laying eggs by then.

We searched and searched for the queen.

A cluster of queen cells.