A brace of Quoons! Discovered at the weekend.

[Castor]

So we did a Ben Harden jobbie - from the bottom we had a brood chamber with the well marked Queen confined by an excluder, then another full brood, then the Harden style 3 or 4 frame bit with my Nicot Corpularve bits on between pollen and honey.

Only one queen of 10 took, and due to me being unwell, the little devil took advantage of my inattention and hatched into the top section above the excluder. We found the empty cell.

So the search began.....we didn't find a new queen, virgin or otherwise, but what we did find, above the excluder, was *another* well marked Queen. She and the other queen had clearly been co-existing in the same hive for some time. This is the happiest, healthiest hive we have, so maybe there's a a lesson here.

What I can't figure out is how I managed to mark two queens in the same hive - and where's the VQ gone?

Also: Why can't these bees read the same books I do? It would be so much simpler all round...