Time: Unlimited
Brood time table
This can look complicated, but it’s not, so if you are not mathematical, don’t go green and retch. There is a picture of the table with no explanation here.
It visually represents what happens in a swarming and emergency scenario and is relevant to the bee lifecycle, queen cells, manipulations, swarm prevention, and varroa. It explains everything, so it is mega important. If you don’t know the lifecycle of the three castes, you will find this problematic. So, go back to the beginning.
When I was studying physics at school, we had homework on the properties of waves. It didn't seem easy, but I came up with a beautiful theorem that made me feel proud. Subsequently, the whole class was lampooned for getting it wrong (which implied that we had been poorly taught). This table is much the same; I initially got it hopelessly wrong. That is because I thought too detailed and got in a muddle with the brood timing.
It is a “time chart,” not a bar chart. What happens first is indicated at the bottom of the table. The column on the left gives a hypothetical date. The column on the far-right shows the number of days, so you can look across a row and see what is happening on that date. OA represents the days when Oxalic acid administration will be most beneficial.
Some beekeepers never grasp the honey bee life cycle, but you are smarter than them. You will find this easier to learn if you go into your computer split screen mode and a copy of the chart.
Columns
First, I’ll explain the meaning of the hieroglyphics. In both swarming and emergency scenarios, two columns represent queen cells, and one each is for worker (green) and drone brood (mauve). A solid brown line separates the swarming and emergency columns. The RQ column represents the pattern of the cells destined to become QC. FE is for the first emergency cells and LE the last. The pattern of the worker and drone cells is almost identical in both scenarios.
Colours
Pale celadon boxes represent open queen cells
Greens/Greens represent worker brood
purple drone brood.
Yellow closed queen cells
If you are armed with your brood and queen development knowledge, I hope I need to say nothing more.
To check you’ve grasped it, pretend you are an egg laid in a queen cup on April 28 in the RQ column; put your finger on the grey box marked with an “e”. Each day you get older as you move your finger up each box. So you move your finger up one box to April 29th 1, another to April 30th and hatch (after a total of up to 76 hours). Next, you start your development as a QC.
The swarming story
The resident queen swarms
On 7th May. One day after the first QC has been sealed.
New queen
The bright Yellow columns represent closed QC. On May 14, queens emerge and fight, but the workers keep some queens safe. If the beekeeper does not intervene, casts (secondary, post-prime swarms) leave. If more than one cast leaves, they do so at about two-day intervals (it happened with my first colony, something I prefer to forget).
The queen lays
By May 20, the victorious queen has mated and settled down to a life of drudgery. There will be very little sealed worker brood at this time, and by the time her eggs hatch, there will possibly be no sealed worker brood. If you were to check daily to see when all the worker brood has emerged, you could work back and learn when the old queen laid her last egg.
At first, the new Q will produce workers. Drones are not a priority.
Oxalic acid sublimation
The final issue is determining when the home colony will have no sealed brood and when oxalic acid (OA) can be administered with great efficacy. Indeed, no earlier than May 22. But if the queen starts laying sooner, May 25th would be better, so long as the drone brood is destroyed. An inspection on May 25 will determine the presence of worker and drone brood.
Signs of Swarm versus Emergency Queen Cells
In both swarming and emergency scenarios, the QC are of multiple ages. With swarming, there are eggs even when the QC are about to be sealed, but I am unsure when she lays the last egg before she swarms. It is probably three days.
The pattern is identical in both scenarios When the oldest QC are days 1–3, with no sealed QC.
When the youngest QC is day one, and the oldest is day 4 with no eggs, i.e. no day 5, this suggests emergency QC.
If there are sealed QC and the youngest QC is day two with no eggs, this, too, suggests an emergency.
If there are sealed QC, with or without eggs, and QC of all ages, the Q may be about to swarm.
Sometimes, the pattern suggests an emergency when put in context. For example, I found the only open worker brood was fat larva and there were no open QC, just closed QC. This was consistent with when I applied MAQS. A new queen would emerge in 5 days.
After a swarm, the cut-off in the age of unsealed QC indicates when the queen laid her final egg. Assuming she laid it the day before she swarmed (but that is a little unknown), the day after she swarmed, there will be no day one QC, the next day, no day two, etc. This explains when the swarm occurred and how soon a queen will emerge. For example, when there are only day 5 open QC, a reasonable deduction is that queens will emerge three to four days later.
This demonstrates how a “cut-off in the age of the brood” can provide valuable information. Do not confuse this with a brood break when no sealed brood exists.
The problem with spotting a cut-off is that it can be difficult to age QC precisely. Natural variability is caused by weather, and QC growth is continuous, not in neat stages. It requires great proficiency in spotting eggs, which requires good eyesight, good lighting, pale combs or preferably plastic frames.
Brood
