A couple of days ago I took a look into hive #1. There were a lot of bees and the first thing I noticed was a large number of drones. Lots of drones! Drones everywhere! Maybe 50% of the bees were drones. I didn't (don't) know what that meant, but I didn't think it was good. Usually the drones make up a small percentage of the hive, maybe up to 20% at odd times. All these drones might mean a laying worker. This disastrous situation arises when the colony becomes queenless. With out the suppressive pheromones, one or more workers' ovaries develop and they begin laying. Since they haven't (can't) mated, all the eggs develop into haploid drones. This is a very difficult problem to correct, and if not corrected, the colony will die.
I inspected the hive as thoroughly as I could. I saw no capped brood, worker or drone. I saw no larvae. I saw no eggs. I saw no queen, either.
Remember, this is the hive from which 12 days earlier I had taken a frame of brood to place in #3 and it had two capped queen cells on it. I figured, then, that either the colony was getting ready to swarm or they were replacing their queen (supersedure). It hadn't, to my knowledge swarmed, so what was going on? Had a new queen been raised and not yet started laying? Had a new queen died or been eaten on her mating flight? Was there a laying worker? What to do, what to do?
If there was no queen, perhaps I could take a brood frame from #2 with eggs or very young (<3 days old) and the workers would make a new queen. So, that's what I did.
I put the top brood box back onto #1, opened #2 and found a frame with the youngest larvae I could identify- as usual, I didn't see any eggs. I made sure the queen was not on the frame, sprayed the nurse bees with my honey-bee-healthy and placed it into the top box of #1. I brushed all the bees off the comb of the frame from #1 and put it into the vacancy in #2. Then closed everything up.
Did I even need to do this? Will it work? Stay tuned. I'll give it a couple of weeks.
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