Would be grateful for advice as to what to do now.
I installed a package at the begging of July and it was doing very well. With 8 fully drawn foundation-less combs I added the flow super 3 weeks ago and the bees had pretty much wax sealed everything and were depositing honey in it. As of last night it was chock full of bees but this morning they were gone and the honey too!
I had been inspecting weekly but skipped last week because they seemed to be doing so well and I had read we were well past the time of year for swarming.
I plan on doing a thorough inspection tomorrow and was looking for advice on what to look for and what procedure I might employ to prevent after-swarms.
Thanks in advance
I think the trick to prevent after-swarms would be to break every queen cell down bar the best looking one. It gets tricky if you find that queens are emerging during the inspection. Last time I saw that I just closed the hive up & let the new queens sort it out.
On another occasion I split the remaining colony in two, making sure that each split had queen cells. That doubles the chance of getting a successfully mated queen.
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