Hello guys, I am a lurker on here and have been for 15 years. But today I have seen something I have never seen before.
A little background info. my bee's are italians, last year very mean. I got them in 1999 and had 78 hives. In 2003 i started to build a ministry and a church and did not treat or open a hive since this spring. 12 hives had survived. yesterday I caught a swarm which left one of my hives. I put it up and went through the hive that had swarmed. I counted over 35 swarm cells in it, about equally spread from center to bottom board. I ended up splitting them , very calm. but too my surprized I counted 6 virgin queens and two old queens in the hive. I was watching my swarm hive to see if they were going to stay in place and low and behold a young queen left the hive and was followed by 1/2 dozen drones and I got to watch her mate. first time seeing this.
checked the swarm while she was gone and found a 2nd queen an older one in the swarm. young queen came back. Now swarm has two queens in it. 
Have you ever seen this kind of stuff. by the way no mites in the hives or foul brood, a couple of cells of noxema in one hive..
Have you ever seen this kind of stuff before
dennis c.

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html

Guidelines for posting to BEE-L can be found at:
http://honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/guidelines.htm