In message <00bb01c343e5$8b116290$7604c518@gollum>, James Fischer
<[log in to unmask]> writes
>Something "scary" happened yesterday.
snip
>The odds against both "losing the queen", and also finding her right
>under your nose?
I dropped a queen and not finding her, thought she must have dropped
into the hive. After looking through all the ret of the hives, I went
past that hive and discovered a small cluster of bees ushering her back
towards the leg of the hive stand on the opposite side to where I
thought I'd dropped her.

But a friend reported losing a clipped queen, then found her in a
neighbouring colony where the clipped queen had also been lost, but
entered at a stage where he had already reduced the cells to just one.
The queen laid a few eggs then the virgin hatched and went off in a
swarm leaving the foreign queen to take over. I will get the full story
as I think he said the second queen had done the same and had gone into
a mating nuc with a cell.
--
James Kilty

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