In our last blog post we covered the mini swarm that appeared on the shed in our observation area, which our beekeeper placed in a box with some frames.

The beekeepers checked the mini swarm today, and found about half a frame of bees with “quite a nice looking queen. It’s too small to be a regular swarm, I suspect it is from someone’s mini mating nuc – this is a small hive with the express purpose of getting a new queen mated, and is used when rearing queens. Considering the small number of bees, I was quite surprised to see they had drawn out about half of one side of the frame they are on. We gave them some feed, and will need to keep a very close eye on them if they have any chance of surviving.”

We’ve circled the queen in the photo below:

The beekeepers noticed some of the sealant around the windows on the observation hive and supers had started to be removed. They wondered what was going on, until today when the caught the culprit red handed: