At last, some good news

Yesterday it was time to look into Olea's hive to see if there was a laying queen.  In a top bar hive, the bees will partially attach some of the comb to side walls.  If one does not cut it free before moving the bar, the comb will break.  (I can attest to that).  I had been using a steak knife to cut the comb but I recently purchased a top bar hive tool which I used yesterday for the first time.  It was easier than the steak knife but it still required careful use.
Anyway... I first smoked the bees as Olea's colony has been feisty.  Instead of starting at the back, I looked in the window and located a bar that was not yet completely drawn (#13 I think) removed it and set it in the little space behind the follower board.  I did it this way because I do not have a top bar comb stand (or here) and I wanted to avoid a repeat of the comb falling onto the ground.  I removed and inspected each comb moving towards the front of the hive.  The bees were easily aroused and I did not hesitate to use more smoke.  On #10 I saw larvae and on #9 I saw the queen!  Her phenotype suggests that she has carniolan genes as she is darker and a bit smaller than a typical italian and a little larger than a carni.  Of course, I am not 100% certain that Olea's swarmed and that this is a new queen, but that is a reasonable assumption.  And if she is new, I hope that the personality of the colony will change for the better as their present demeanor is unpleasant.
#2 is still not strong but there is excellent brood pattern in both brood boxes.  I did not see the queen.
I did not inspect #3 but checked its honey production.  The top super had moderate honey but the side frames were still empty.  I deliberated whether to add a super and finally decided to do so.  I went to the shed, grabbed a new super with frames and put it on.  However, the bottom of the frame was uneven and left a gap.  (I will have to even it out somehow.)  Back to the shed for a different super.  Took one out and saw that 3 frames in it had honey in the cells as well as ants all over.  Shook all the ants off, scraped off propolis and burr wax, added 7 more frames and put the super on #3 which now has three supers.  I think the fall harvest will be good.

Update on Olea's, or, it is not as easy as expected

Three days ago I looked in Olea's window and was surprised by what I saw.

Only some days earlier, all those combs were covered with bees.  (These are the last combs in the box.  There are still a dozen combs full of bees.)  Where had they gone?  I looked on the ground in front of the hive and was relieved not to see hundreds of corpses.  Have you figured it out yet?
Of course I cannot be certain, but I think they swarmed.  I looked all around our yard and into the neighbors' yard looking for a bunch of bees flying around a cluster.  No luck. 
Today I took the MAQ out of Olea's.  When I put it in, I put 2 empty bars above it.  In the 8 days since, the bees had built a large comb on one bar and a nubbin on the other.  The larger was mostly drone cell size and there was a patch of nectar, too.  I placed the bars on the hive while I retrieved the MAQ and moved the other bars back together.  I decided to place the 2 bars into the hive even though there already was so much empty comb.
Moving things shook the box a bit and the large comb fell over onto the ground.

One of the things that can make bees testy is being queenless.  After a colony swarms, there will not be a laying queen for up to 2 weeks.  Throughout my working on the hive I was besieged by angry soldier bees, adding a bit of credence to my theory of what happened to the missing bees.  It got so annoying that I fetched by honey-b-healthy sprayer and repeatedly spritzed the bees flying about my face.
I did get the hive back together with the new combs towards the back.  There are now 20 bars in Oleas.  I will look into Olea's around the 24th to look for evidence of a laying queen.

Uh-oh. Bees under threat, again

A bit has happened since the last blog.
When we left off, I had combined the boxes of the defunct #1 with #2 & 3 and had some supers of capped honey to extract.  Four days later I took a look to see how the combining had done.  In #3, the newspaper was intact but there were no bees in the added box.  I must have placed the entrance of the double screen board the wrong way so all the bees had flown out.  (Measure twice, cut once.)  I took off the box and switched in a couple of frames that had honey and pollen.   There was still brood in the lower super but the bees seemed to be back-filling.  There was a smattering of brood in the upper brood box.  Maybe the queen was moving down.  I considered putting in a queen excluder, but since I had not spotted the queen I could just as well have trapped her in the super.
#2 had chewed through the paper and there were still bees in the box.  I shook the bees off, removed the box and switched some frames in 2 as well.  I did not look into the brood box.
We had extracted the honey from #1's supers, getting about 28 pounds.  I put 4 stickies onto #3 and 10 onto #2.
I added 2 more bars to Olea's for a total of 18 now.
The bees were not going to the sand/rock water source so I changed it to peat moss.  (As of today, they are not going there, either.)

Five days ago I put in sticky boards to check the mite level.  The following day (9 days since last inspection), a couple we know came over to look into the hives with me; they have just started their first hive.  We looked through #3.  There was still brood in the lower super, perhaps even more than before.  We did not see the queen.  But I did see a bee affected by deformed wing virus.
This is not my bee, but it could have been. 
Deformed wing virus is transmitted by the mites and is a sign of parasitic mite syndrome, a bad thing for a hive to have.  I also saw on the floor of the hive the abdomen of a drone pupa with a mite attached.  (The nurse bees had removed the pupa because of the mite, a demonstration of hygienic behavior.)
I took a look at just a few inches of the sticky board and saw 10 or more mites, after only one day.  I knew the girls were in big trouble.
I went back to the shed and got MAQs and put two into both Langstroth hives with spacers.  Two days later I put a single MAQ into Olea's.  I put it on the floor of the box next to the first frame of brood I reached and put two empty bars above it.  I got this idea from a bee forum.
Today I took out the sticky boards.  There was well over 100 mites on each.