Originally Posted by
Mellifera Crofter
Oh, no! It's a September swarm that wasn't. Thinking there might be a virgin queen in there, I turned the excluder from QX to fully open - and now they're gone. Just a handful of bees on a frame that has some honey in it. They did behave strangely yesterday - as though they couldn't decide whether to go into the nuc or not - but the branch on which they had gathered were empty of bees - so, the queen wasn't on there anymore. Eventually they all went into the nuc. If it was a queen on a mating flight, then I hope she found her way back to the hive from which she came (the swarm wasn't big - but bigger than a handful or two).
In another apiary a bait hive got occupied - but in that case I'm fairly sure it was a virgin queen returning from a mating flight, and missed her hive. There was none of that frantic comb-building one sees in a swarm, and the hive next to her is now queenless.
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