Either my bee math sucks!... OR...

Either my Bee Math Sucks OR ... well the bees are messing with me!
I have spent a lot of time reading books and forums about bees they could at least pretend to go along with things.

Comb with emerged queen cell and capped queen cell.

 So, the story goes....

On the 17th May I split the hive (22 days prior). So from this day on no queen was present, all brood was either capped, larvae, or eggs.

On the 31st May (14 days later) I inspected. On this day there was a beautiful capped queen cell. I thought wonderful this queen cell must have been made from an egg, if it had been made from a young larva it would already have emerged. Queens take 16 days to emerge from the egg being laid, eggs remain eggs for just 3.5 days. Since this is 14 days after the queen was removed an egg MUST have been used. This being a Saturday the queen would therefore be born on the Sunday, Monday or maybe Tuesday. She takes a week to then become sexually mature so may make her mating flight the following weekend.

On the 8th June (22 days later) I inspected. The beautiful queen cell had hatched as expected. But HANG ON, there is another one right next to it! Go on look at the picture, tell me my eyes are deceiving me! Surely this isn't possible! For there to be a capped queen cell present there MUST have been a queen in there laying within the last 16 days. This is 22 days after the split. I am very confused if anyone knows what is going on please do tell me.

It surely cannot be that the queen has emerged, mated, and starting laying already. The weather last week was awful and she will not have been sexually mature, and even then it would take 8 days before the cell is capped. The only option I can see is that there must have been another queen cell that I missed. The new queen has managed to get mated and has started laying. Then the bees have decided to make another queen cells anyway.

It might well support my other news!
Sunday was supposed to be terrible weather. It was supposed to rain all day. It did not. It was hot and sunny :) After the hive inspection my family and I decided to have the day in York. On heading to the car I noticed some activity at the bait hive on my shed roof ~9am.

During lunch I had a phone call from my slightly panicked neighbour to say my shed was "...covered in bees". He said they had just all appeared and made a lot of noise. He thought it was motorbikes on the main road.  I told him all would be fine, an quietly hope that was the case.

On returning the bait hive now looked very busy ~4:00pm:

The swarm had clearly moved in. This is a homemade national style brood box. I got a sneaky pic of the bees later after moving them to the apiary.

They don't look like my bees, they are all far too uniformly coloured for my little mongrels. Since they only just moved in they shouldn't be orientated to the position so the move shouldn't affect them.

While the day was so nice I went checked another bait hive.

Woo-hoo two-for-two. This one seems to have less bees in so I will give them a day or two before I move them in case this is just advanced scouting. These may well be my bees but either way I will try and give them a good home.