Dead Queen Never

well just to take a moment to to up date you on what is happening in the hives

1. the queen wasn't dead... the next week we expected to find lots of queens cells but we found a lovely marked queen running around laying eggs in all available spaces. we found 2 good swarm cells and decided to make up a nucleus colony.

2. I started this spring with 3 good colonies and now I have 11.. well you might wonder why I haven posted... I think that is the explanation. so the 2 Apiaries now look like this
Hatton Road 1 Colony so far produced 15kg honey (mainly Oil Seed Rape) and 4 Nucleus colonies one a caste swarm from one of Hattons nucs and 1 caste swarm from Snakey lane (I think caste swarms happen when the emerging queen doesn't kill all the competing queen cells and flies out to mate and when she comes back another queen has hatched so she flies off with half of the bees to try and form a new colony) interestingly I know which colony the the Snakey lane swarm came from but I can't work out which colony the Hatton one came from but the Hatton swarm has built good comb and the queen is laying already 4 days later (this does make me suspicious that it is actually a caste but a small swarm from else where).
Now down at Snakey Lane  the Oil seed Rape has been keeping the bees so busy we are battling to keep on top of it. we have the 2 original colonies plus 4 Nuc boxes  the first Nuc came from the colony which had the suspected queen loss that didn't happen and I think it is doing fine the second nuc came from the lovely (Valium bees) that don't seem to be bothered by having bee-keepers around. and was located on another part of the site by a pond and appeared good and strong of course these were the ones that swarmed. and each colony has produced another nuc making a total of 4.
Ok I must dash we do need to check the bees again today