From tomorrow onwards the queen bees will gradually begin to lay less eggs each day as we go past mid point in the year. In Norwich we still have some busy weeks ahead of us (the lime trees have begun to flower and after those the sweet chestnut will come into bloom) but we only have one more month now before we have to start thinking about next winter and feeding our bees sugar syrup for their winter stores.
So far this year queen rearing has been quite good with a fair percentage hatching out and getting mated. If a queen doesn't hatch out I see that as personal failure. But if she hatches out but fails to get back to the box she left then that is just bad luck. It can of course be bad weather but this year we have had good mating days evenly spaced every week or ten days or so apart.
Some of the queens I have seen have been extremely small and again I think that is down to the beekeeper as I'm sure that left to their own devices the bees would have prevented them from surviving. I have two nuc boxes where the bees have a very small patch of brood with a new queen cell in the middle of it. The bees definitely don't think those queens are up to the mark and are taking steps to replace them.
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