Mandy, David, Jo, Eric, Linda
Checked the very large colony – 2 supers about a third full, and one super where the queen had been trapped.
Checked carefully but didn’t see her in the super or either of the 2 brood boxes.
However, in total 3 frames from the super had queen cells with larvae in (about 6 days old) so the colony was split to provide 2 nucs (each with 2 queen cells, stores, syrup feed and extra workers: the brood box still has one queen cell left (as we didn’t find the queen, any eggs or very young larvae).
So we should have 3 young queens hatching out in a week or so: we’ll leave them alone for 3 weeks to give the new queens time to hatch, fly, mate and start laying.