Anything is possible with bees!Quote:
I had an interesting thing happen. I made up a nuc at the end of April and it developed a nice Queen cell which hatched fine. We had a spell of lovely weather just right for mating.
Then I noticed a large number of bees clustering under the nuc (it is a Payne’s polynuc with a mesh section in the floor) initially I wondered if they had reared two queens and were about to swarm. But the cluster persisted for several days during which I did not have time to deal with it. I wondered if the nuc was very congested. A few days ago I went through the nuc. No eggs. Lots of bees inside the nuc but not overcrowded. I transferred the frames into a National hive and brushed the cluster off the bottom of the nuc into the hive. Since then the bees have all stayed in the hive and flown as usual
Is it possible that the queen flew and mated and on return missed the entrance and ended up on the outside of the mesh floor and then workers clustered round her??
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