Ran out this morning and bought a replacement queen for the “Bees Rules” hive. Very carefully went through every frame multiple times to find the queen(s). Only found one nicely plump queen with all of her bits and pieces in place (on the 23rd frame I checked). Caught her in a clip and went through the hive one more time looking for Quasimodo. No supercedure cells, a couple of empty queen cups, but no mutant queen. I decided that the existing queen (new in July) was the safest bet. Marked her with bright orange and put her back in the hive.
Ended up using the new VHS italian queen to replace the 2017 queen in the Utah hive. I managed to get the old queen into a wooden queen cage and placed her in the Tupperware bowl with some fondant, a sponge of water, and a few attendant bees. I’ll try to keep her alive this way until I can verify a good acceptance of the new queen. It will be interesting to see how this experiment works out.
New experience with Eversweet Apiaries in WV purchasing the new queen. Real nice guy in the shop and I had a great visit with him. I should have gotten his name, but I have a feeling I’ll be back next spring. Spotted him a 20 to remember me when he starts taking reservations for New River queens next year. It would be very much in keeping with my plans to get a red-line mite mauler and a Perdue ankle biter for the main hives next May.
In the process of marking the queen orange, I moved to my garage patio, took off the leather gloves and bee jacket. Marked the queen and gave her a while to dry before suiting back up and putting the hive back together. Somehow, I didn’t remember to zip up the front of my jacket. In the middle of pissing the bees off by stacking the boxes back up I suddenly became aware that there was a bee inside my veil!! The little bugger stung me on the right cheek before I could move out of the area and take the veil off. It does not hurt too bad. We’ll see how much swelling it causes. Benedryl tonight before bed I think.