Wiggly mites, waggly dances, and queen cell cups

It's as if a switch has been flicked.A month ago I was sweating profusely while heaving the weighty supers from the hives, stacking them in the shed, and subsequently extracting bucket after bucket (after bucket 😄) of sparkling, golden honey.In between times, I was replacing the pilfered stores with heavy blocks of fondant, uniting colonies, and moving nucs from their summer quarters to sheltered apiaries for the winter.It was a lot of backbreaking work, but I was accompanied by the constant mewing of dispersing buzzard families, the now-mute warblers in the hedgerows, and the swallows constantly flitting about overhead. When I stopped for a breather, there was always something to distract me from the 'hard graft'.The weather was still warm — it still felt like summer — and the foragers (at least those lucky enough to be within range) were absorbed with the Himalayan balsam along the river.But, in a few short weeks, that's all changed.All the resident swallows and martins have gone,…