Good news and (possible) bad news

Preparing to go into #2 with Dinah

Friday I went into the hives with Dinah.  Dinah will be getting 2 packages of bees next week and I will help her hive them in her top bar hives.  She got the hives from Bee Thinking.  They are quite nice with a hinged roof and a viewing window that runs the complete length of the hive.  They are a bit larger than mine.
After I visited her potential bee yard, she came over to look into my hives wearing her new bee jacket. 
We first went into #2.  This was the hive in which Matt and I had seen supersedure cells.  By my calculations, enough time had passed for a queen to have emerged, removed her rivals, mated and started laying.  I was prepared to add a second super, if needed, and planned to remove and replace the drone frame I had put in 3 weeks earlier.  So now the bad news.  There did not seem to be much more honey in the super than last visit.  In the top box were lots of drones.  By lots I mean that several frames were covered with drones with only a few workers among them.  There were a couple of capped drone cells in the top box and we saw one drone emerging.  There were some empty cells and try as I might, I could see neither eggs nor larvae in them.  In the bottom box it was pretty much the same; lots of drones and empty brood cells with surrounding pollen and honey.  Some of the empty cells had liquid in them so there may be eggs/larvae there.  We did see the supersedure cells that were now empty and being dismantled.  The drone frame was pretty much unchanged from when I put it in, so I took it out and put in a different frame.
So what was going on here?  When I saw all the drones I feared a queenless hive with laying workers, but in that case I would have expected drone larvae and capped brood.  The empty supersedure cells implies that the queens had at least emerged.  I fear that hive #2 is in trouble- queenless and doomed.  However, a ray of hope.  I re-counted the days since seeing the supersedure cells and it had been only 3 weeks.  So if the queens emerged 7 days after I saw them and then another week for her to mate and start laying, then when I looked Friday, she may have been laying for only a 6 days and therefore the larva would have been 3 days old at the oldest and easily not seen.  You can tell that I am making that ray of hope into a searchlight!  We will see in a week or two.  Fingers crossed.
Now the good news.  We then looked into the nuc.  It was full of bees and all five frames had capped brood and some larvae.  And we saw the queen, a beauty!  I put the five frames from the nuc into a deep box with five frames of empty, drawn comb.  Hive #1 is back!

Activity at #1's entrance Saturday

The apiary now