We looked through the hive on 15th April and the girls were very busy with lots of drone brood and not as many eggs I expected (I didn't realise what that meant at the time). We saw the Queen and I expected them to be planning to swarm but 13 days later they have gone.
We didn't realise at first because there seemed to be lots of bees and even when we found frame after frame with sealed queen cells we didn't twig straight away. So we started to do an artificial swarm but we couldn't find the queen and we looked through twice. So we followed the procedure for artificial swarm when you can't find the queen and shook the bees into the replaced brood box and put the original brood box on the top so that the bees could sort themselves out. But then it started to dawn on me that we hadn't found the queen and we hadn't seen any eggs and all the queen cells were already sealed that they had swarmed.
So we put a frame with two queen cells in the bottom box and left the frames with sealed queen cells in the top box and I will separate them tomorrow.
Goodness knows what will be going on in the garden hive when we open that on Saturday.
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