Good riddance to 2020.

Having just finished the harvest and now moving onto feeding and treating I'll be glad to see the back of the beekeeping year of 2020. The season started with high varroa numbers (a rollover from last years dramas) but these were swiftly brought under control so I thought we were on for a good year. The colony I was looking to split was built up to double brood and in May was splitting at the seams with bees. Towards the end of May swarm cells appeared so I split the hive but removed the old queen and put her in a nuc at an out apiary leaving 2 brood boxes with lots of bees and almost ripe queen cells. After removing all but one QC I thought my job was done however 3 weeks later after checking the bees it was clear one QC had failed leaving only one queen right hive. The old queen in the nuc with plenty of bees and stores stopped laying which I wasn't too worried about until after a week I noticed she still hadn't laid. A week turned into 3 and it was clear the old queen had stopped laying so she was removed and a new queen bought in with the plan of uniting this new nuc with the hive without a queen. New queen placed in, left for a week and... disappeared! The bees clearly didn't accept her leaving me with 2 hives without a queen! The current plan now is to unite everything with the queen right hive and forget 2020 ever happened.

The joys of beekeeping.