I went into the hive today to switch out the drone frame. Much to my surprise, there were no capped cells on the frame. In fact, there were only a lot of empty cells. No larvae and no eggs that I could see. Oh-oh, I thought. There should be something here by now.
So I did an inspection of all the frames in the brood box. My findings: no capped cells, no larvae, no eggs seen, lots of clean empty cells, no queen cells and, no queen! I looked in the super for the queen or brood; no luck.
I hadn't spotted the queen 2 weeks ago, but we hadn't really looked for her. Maybe she was gone already. I have no idea what happened to her. Maybe I dropped her or squished her. I'm not even 100% sure she's gone, but all signs indicate so.
I emailed Bob Mount, a local beekeeper regarding this, asking how long I can wait until replacing the queen. I know that the workers will start laying if no queen is present and then it's all over. He soon wrote back saying I need to re-queen right away. I wrote back to him asking if he knew a local source of queens. I also called Jeremy Rose and had to leave a message. If he has queens ready now, and he calls back today, I'll be off on a road trip to San Luis Obispo tomorrow.
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