Today was a picture perfect day for checking the hives only to find treachery is running amok in the hives. Both hives have built supercedure queen cells. I'm not surprised Hive 2 is not pleased with their royal highness (Pic 1). The hive has been behind since the beginning but recently seemed to catch up. Inspecting the hive today, we quickly found the queen. However, tho' there was capped brood, there didn't seem to be many larvae and I couldn't find any eggs, tho' it is often hard to see them against the white MannLake PF100 frames. Off with her head and let's get a queen who wants to build some brood! Unfortunately, this will mean a lull while the new queen goes on her mating flight and finally gets back to work. Not sure what happened but this queen is on her way out...Ciao, baby!
I am very surprised about Hive 1 developing a new queen. She has been a dependable layer and there are new eggs and larvae. This has always been the strong hive and I'm disappointed to see something is not pleasing the ladies. I almost crushed the cell but thought the bees know better than I and it would be best to let them decide. I hope there is enough time for the new queens to get established and build up some more numbers before it gets cold.
Hive Notes:
Now that the bees are not pleased with her, we FINALLY saw the queen in Hive 1. This is the first time I've seen her since May when I hung the cage and installed the package. There were lots of bees in the new super but hardly and comb was drawn. I inspected the upper deep and there was about a 50/50 mix of brood and honey on 7 frames. Having seen the queen, I decided to move the empty frames to the center, sugared the upper deep and put everything back as it was. I'll continue to feed them to try to stimulate building comb in the super.
Hive 2 was very similar to Hive 1–just a slight amount of comb in the super and about half of the upper deep was filled with honey (Pic 2). The problem was there is a lot of empty cells and not a lot of capped brood. The bottom deep still had 3 frames untouched with hardly any bees on them. The drone cell frame was as clean as when I 1st put it in in May. leaving the drone frame in place, I moved the other empty frames to the center and then reversed the deeps, putting the upper in the bottom position. My hope is the bees will draw out comb on the empty frames and the queen will move up and start laying in the older cells.
Lastly, I've noticed lot of bearding occurring on this hive (bees standing on the outside of the hive near the entrance).
Plan:
Keep feeding and check the hives in the next 5-7 days to see if the supercedure cells are sealed. I'll also do a better job checking for eggs.
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