unbeelievably good post

Bunk delivers

You should have shouted MUH PATRIARCHY and released the swarm in the jewelry store.

awesome

Awesome bunk.
What tourney are you preparing for?

ATXI, while CCP say I'm not allowed to compete, my punishment for being so damm awesome I feel, I am allowed to make up the numbers for testing purposes.

Also, I was in the new hive today, we have the queen. Damm I left camera behind in Stratford, I'll get it back Monday latest.
I couldn't see any freshly laid eggs, they're white/transparent "," shape in the bottom of the comb and hard to see under the best conditions, but it was damm bright and sunny it was mostly blinding.

Knowing we have a queen is a major bonus, we have to see her laying next and she needs to get on this immediately. The bees have built up lots of the foundation we put in the hive and eaten most of the food, so we put in extra frames and food. Actually we had 7 frames in there that had no foundation at all, since we were caught unprepared, but the bees have started building their own, hanging down from the frame top where the foundation would have been. Rather than trash their work, we left those partial built frames in, they know what they are doing more than beekeepers do.
The bees only live six weeks, and it takes 21 days for a newly laid egg to emerge as a worker. We don't know the ages of the bees we have captured, but it should be a good spectrum from 2-6 weeks, so the 3 week hatching cycle should kick in before the majority of the caught bees start dying.
If not, it's all over. Again.

The queen herself might be too old to lay eggs, or even a virgin queen, no real way to know. But a freshly laid egg gets capped after about 6 days, so in a week, certainly two, there should be a lot of capped brood cells.

silly question: if the bees dont gather enough honey to last them the winter, can you not add honey yourself inside the hive?

Yes, you have to. But sugar water. The idea is, steal all the honey and feed them sugar water. Then sell the honey for many times the value of the sugar water, all the equipment and your time invested.
Unfortunately, as a business venture, it's really tough as you're up against an army of retired mother fuckers who are supplementing their already plentiful income and undercut you easily. Similarly there is an army of farmers each of which has his own bees as a side part to his main business, so they undercut you and neither do they hire your bees for pollenation. Honey isn't enough, you have to make your bees do something else, bee farming and selling whole colonies is big business right now, approx 60% of bees (all the bees in the uk and america) died over the winter of 2012, I haven't been able to get any at all this year as all the farms are struggling to recover, let alone fill orders, so getting this swarmed colony drop in for free has been very welcome indeed.

whats a swarm worth and is it measured in weight somehow or some other method?