The road to failiure - Step 1

I didn't manage to find the queen at the beginning of the week. The weather was not good and it started to rain. I only managed to get a quick look through the hive but she wasn't around so had to try agin.
My second attempt didn't start well as I went through all the frames and couldn't see her.I had another go and this time she appeared and I caught her using a new queen catcher I had bought.
I normally use a bulldog clip type of catcher

It has slots in that allow the worker bees to escape but keep the queen inside. You leave it for a few minutes for the workers to get out leaving the queen behind.
If you are marking the queen you then transfer her to a marking tube.

You push the plunger up the tube [it doesn't go all the way to the top so you can't squash her] to keep her still and then you use a marker pen through the mesh.
However last time I did this, the queen flew away as she was going into the tube so this time I decided to use a new type of catcher which combines the catcher and marker.

It works like this

It worked better than I expected and she was transferred to the cassette and queen excluder added to lock her in.
She was then left to lay her eggs in the cassette for no more than two days.

Two days later she was released back into the hive and the cassette bought home.
Last time I used this method there weren't too may eggs but this time virtually all of the brown cups had an egg in,

Honey bee eggs measure 1 to 1.5 mm long, about half the size of a single grain of rice.
The cups were then transferred to the rearing frame which was put in a hive in Ravensden for the bees to work on.

There are 20 cups in the frame but I have no idea how many queens I will produce. I will be happy with just a couple,