In the nick of time - or was it?

The recent cold weather has made it difficult to keep track of what my bees are up to.  I last looked in on them 22 days ago and even then it wasn't really warm enough.  Knowing that the forecast was for low temperatures I at least made sure they had a bit of room to grow.

Two days ago was the first time we have seen double figures (℃) for a while but it was grey and windy and I was wearing two fleeces so an inspection didn't seem fair.  Instead I set up a bait hive on top of the compost bin.  By yesterday it was already attracting a lot of interest from scouts, flying all around and going in and out to measure it up.

I had hoped to inspect the bees yesterday but we had torrential thundery showers all afternoon so it wasn't possible.  First thing this morning there were even more scouts so I assumed a swarm was imminent.  

While I was putting foundation into frames there were lots of scouts investigating what I was up to so I set up another bait hive nearby and it was immediately busy with bees.

Time for an inspection.  Hive 1 has my best behaved bees, unfashionably stripy but very well-behaved.   I had given them a second brood three weeks ago so I didn't expect them to be planning to swarm and they weren't - everything looked fine.

Hive 2 was the one I expected to be most likely to swarm.  It was booming last time, already on double brood, so I had given it a super.  When I looked in the top box the first thing I saw was a sealed queen cell.  I feared the worst but two frames later there was the queen.  I put her straight into a nuc with two frames of brood, one of stores, three of foundation and a feeder.  My plan is to unite them with the killers in hive 3 as a way of re-queening.  I will go back to the main hive in five days to reduce the queen cells to one.

At this stage I was feeling pleased so I skipped the nasty bees in 3 and moved on to hive 4.  This was the smallest colony three weeks ago but was spread out over a double brood box - with a young 2020 queen, lots of space, lots of stores and 5 frames of brood - what could possibly go wrong?  Looking in the top box I found half a dozen sealed queen cells and one which looked as though it had recently been opened (from the inside).

To my surprise there were also lots of eggs but I didn't see the (marked) queen.  At one stage I thought I could hear a squeaking queen but with the sparrows in the box just above, the mowers on the golf course and all the traffic from the road I couldn't be sure and by the time I was ready to record it on the phone I couldn't hear it again.

I can't make this out.  I presume this hive has swarmed in the last day or two, perhaps before or in between the downpours yesterday.  But why is there a newly opened queen cell, suggesting a newly emerged queen? The timing doesn't make sense.  If the queen had been cooped up for days waiting for better weather to swarm surely she wouldn't have carried on laying.  Not being certain if there is a virgin queen I have left two queen cells for the moment, hoping that if a cast emerges it will enter one of the bait hives.  It is interesting that the number of scouts at each is much less than this morning, suggesting that it was hive 2 that was about to go.

I left the killers in hive 3 to last.  They were as badly behaved as ever but the one colony I would be pleased to see the back of shows no sign of swarming.  Just my luck.