Hi Fred, thank you very much for your offer but I already made a commitment to buy a nuc this afternoon. I read your reply after I got back. I explained this to Jeff as well.
How are you doing ?
I’m finding that there is not much nectar around at the moment. Hopefully it will pick up with the Marri and Jarrah Flowering next month. Cheers, George
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All good mate.
Gorgeous day to inspect today so made the most this morning and performed some frame manipulation to weaken a strong hive and strengthen a weak hive.
My bees appear to be bringing stuff in. Waiting for the honey to be capped. I was extracting more this time last year though. Still plenty of time left in the season.
Bee keeping is just as much as a waiting game. Your patience will be rewarded.
Hope you get a taste of honey soon.
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Cheers Jeff, I’ve bookmarked this little gem for future reference. 
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Hi Fred, I’m happy to wait till next season if we don’t get a good flow in summer. Whatever is there I will leave it for the bees to get them through winter. Cheers, George
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After 3 days, I did a brood check. As this photo reveals, emergency queens are started.
cheers
PS. I had 4 other colonies to check for new queen. 3 were queen-rite, one wasn’t. I stuck a frame with BIAS into that colony, to be checked in 3 days. They were trying to make queens from unfertilized eggs. Seeing as they were doing that, they should be keen to make a queen with fertilized eggs.
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How do you know it’s unfertilised?
Didn’t think that was possible… if unfertilised eggs emerge with drones, does a drone emerging from a queen cell make it a ‘drag queen’? 
I know it sounds outrageous Fred, but for some reason they try to make queens with unfertilized eggs. I don’t know why they do it, however it indicates to me that while they’re trying that, there’s a good chance they’ll make emergency queens when I add a frame with BIAS.
In the colony I mentioned, there was the start of 2 queen cells on a frame with no other eggs. Also 2 small sections of drones in worker comb with no other eggs. I destroyed all that before inserting the frame with BIAS.
The topic of bees trying to make queens without fertilized eggs was covered a few years ago. @Dawn_SD might remember the discussion.
I found 2 laying workers at my main bee site over a week ago. One colony was trying to make queens, so I added a brood frame after removing the frames containing drone larvae plus the emergency queen attempts, to that hive. With the second hive, I swapped positions with a colony about 15 meters away. I’ll check both hives tomorrow morning when I’m there to see what honey I can take.
We’re in a heat wave at the moment. Tomorrow’s the only day we’ll have below 30.
PS What I do with the frames containing drones in worker comb is destroy all the brood before placing them in the middle of the bee mass in a busy hive. Only one per hive though, on account that more than one of those frames can lead to hive beetle issues. Perhaps 2 in a real busy hive (checker boarded). The bees clean them up beautifully.
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Nah… Not a type of family where such behaviour is being tolerated. Even if pushed to.
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What makes you think that, @JeffH? 
I do remember it, in fact. It isn’t common, but it can be seen in a hive with laying workers. The nurse bees will nurture an unfertilized egg as if it was going to be a queen. They make a cup around it, feed the larva royal jelly and make a typical peanut shaped cell. At this point it is actually known as a “king cell”. 
If you open such a cell, there will sometimes be 2 pupae inside, reflecting that fact that laying workers often lay multiple eggs in one cell. Needless to say, the King doesn’t help the hive at all, but it makes the nurse bees feel that they are trying to do something constructive… 
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Nice link…I’ve seen queen cells from drone layers often…but this research study was novel to me…thanks for posting that! ABB As an inexperienced beekeeper, when I saw one of these, I erroneously concluded that my nuc was in the process of requeening.
That great photo JeffH is worth a 1000 words!
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In reply to my message: I inspected those two hives earlier today. The first one I mentioned, the one that built dummy queen cells made a new queen (a nice virgin spotted), incidentally that was 12 days ago, thanks to me leaving a date tag on the hive. The other one, the one I swapped positions with another colony still has a laying worker, however it started a dummy queen cell. So what I did was break the DQC down while adding another frame with BIAS before placing a date tag on the hive.
I found another colony/nuc with a laying worker. This one was drastically low in numbers. Not even enough bees to guard a full frame with BIAS. I had a resource hive next to it, which I had taken two frames of brood from. I simply moved it to the other side of the apiary about 12 meters away, then placed the weak nuc in it’s place… 3 of the frames had drone brood on one end. It was just a stroke of luck that the few remaining bees were able to prevent beetles from laying eggs in them.
In reply: After 24 hours, I brought the nuc that was originally drastically low in numbers home. I replaced it with the original resource hive that I had moved away. I did that because enough bees had moved into the weak colony to make it a viable nuc, while not depleting the resource hive to a critical level, remembering that I had removed two brood frames from it. That balanced out nicely.
This morning, after another 24 hours (48 in total), the brood frame has lots of emergency queens underway. A great result.
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