What happened to #2?

The apiary today

#2 used to have two deep and two medium boxes.Why now only one deep and one medium box?, you ask.  I will tell you.
Two days ago I noticed very little activity at #2's entrance.

#1

#2

 I immediately suited up and went into the hive.  Here is a pictorial of what I saw:

Under the telescoping lid

Under the Vivaldi box

Under the top super

Under the bottom super

Under the top deep box

As you can easily see, there are hardly any bees.  Unlike this strong hive (picture from Guildford Dragon NEWS:


I went through the hive and found only a couple of hundred bees, mostly on 2-3 frames in the top brood box.  There was a spotty patch of capped brood and some larvae.  The only drone brood I saw as on a frame bare of bees.  There were many queen cups, a couple of which were partially drawn out, but all were empty.  There was one (smaller than usual) queen cell with an open end indicative of an emerged queen.  I did not see a queen nor any eggs.  I looked for any bees with DWV or any mite feces and found none.  I did not want to do an alcohol wash since that would kill a large percentage of the colony.  Not knowing what else to do, I removed one super and changed the entrance reducer to its smallest size.  I figured there were a few options.  1. Do nothing and observe. 2. Perform an assiduous search for a queen. If she is there, do nothing. if she is not there, either repopulate with the nuc or combine the colony with one of my other hives. 3. Either combine or repopulate without searching for the queen.  I then wrote to my mentor and posted on Beesource Beekeeping Forums.  It was my mentor's opinion that, at best, the colony had swarmed and the new queen had not yet started laying.  She suggested waiting a week and if no queen activity then, go ahead and combine the hive.  A beekeeper on the forum said pretty much the same thing.  That is pretty optimistic, but I think that if they had swarmed that there would be many more bees left behind and much more brood.
Today I removed the bottom deep box, as in the opening picture.
If you have any more questions, feel free to ask.
There still is forage in our yard-

Oak hydrangea

Taking apart Olea's hive

Three days ago, I saw only some bees on the front frames of Olea's, so I decided to dismantle the hive.  I started at the back of the box and found nectar in most of the combs.  I took out only three, one of which had two queen cells on it.  One was open at the end and the other on the side.

Queen cells on both sides of the comb

Open end where a queen has emerged

Queen cell opened on side.  The pupa inside had been killed by another queen and the workers removed the corpse

An empty queen cup

I set these in a holder and went to do some other work (Next paragraph).  When I went back to photograph them, there was a small cloud of bees around them.  I moved the comb further from the hives until the bees had cleaned them up at the end of the day.
I hefted the top super of #1 and since it felt pretty heavy I wanted to add a fourth super.  I had some unassembled frames from Bruce and Greg, but after I had nailed together a couple, I realized they were shallows and I only have medium foundation.  I  got my box of medium frames and assembled them.  I had some Duragilt foundations, also from Bruce and Greg.  I found the Duragilt difficult to install, and I am not the only one.  I stopped after 3 and used plastic foundation on the remaining.
I went to #1, stood on the milk crate and took off the top super.  It had 6 frames of capped honey.  Usually one does not add another box until there are 8 frames full, but I went ahead.  I checkerboarded 2 frames of capped honey.  I looked into the top super of #2 and saw that it was pretty much untouched, so I switched in two frames of capped honey from the lower super.  Left #3 alone.
The next day, while working the roses, I was attacked without provocation and stung in the left eyebrow.

I think the bees might have been extra defensive because of possible robbing behavior triggered by the open nectar left near the hives the day before.  To forestall any further robbing, I decided to completely dismantle Olea's hive.  I put the removed comb with nectar at the far side of the house.  There was quite a bit of wax moth damage on the distal combs.

The bees had removed all the nectar by the next morning

When I reached bar #6, I found capped worker brood and larvae!  There must be a laying queen in there after all.  I put in a bar with fresh wax and nectar (total 7 bars), placed the following board and put on an entrance reducer.  It looks like Olea's may survive.
I pinched off the capped queen cell that I had seen through window weeks ago.

 With manicure scissors, I carefully cut a flap in the side.

 There was the desiccated head and thorax of the pupa.

I opened the cell a bit more and could see some strands of the cocoon.

The two nucs seem to be doing fine.

I am going to need a step-up

I checked the top supers of all three hives today.  #2 and 3 were light and I saw no capped honey when I looked down into the frames.  However, #1 was heavy and had capped honey in 8/10 of the frames!  I added a 3rd super, checker-boarding three frames of capped honey into it.  Now I will need to use Olea's step up to work the hive.

I realized the above picture did not suffice, so I am adding this one.

I am slightly on tip-toe so my eyes are over the hive.
And this photo just to brag a bit.

Rio Samba

Where did it come from, and where did it go?

It really is swarm season!  Across the street, a swarm was captured in a bait box. 
Yesterday I saw this on the grape vine:

It was a pretty large cluster.  I assume it came from #2 since I had seen a swarm cell in there a week before.  But assumptions are often incorrect.
Today there was no activity around the entrance of my bait box so I figured they were not interested.  (It may be that the bait box is directly above 2 active nucs.)  So I called a bee guild member to see if he was interested in collecting it.  He called me back within a half-hour, and just before he called, the cluster had taken flight.  He could hear the buzzing over the phone.  I followed them down the street, where, instead of going into a hive as I expected, they clustered on a tree branch in front of Pauline's house.  This is approximately 150 feet from where they had been. 
About 2 hours later I went to see if the new owners were home yet.  They were not, nor were the bees.  Where they went is unknown- re-cluster or new home.
I do know that there are quite a few bee hives in this neighborhood.

Good news, bad news

Where to begin? 
First, some good news: spring is here and the honey flow is on.

Now an update: 5 days ago two fellow pickleball players and semi-beginning beeks, Terry and Karen, went into the hives with me.  We removed the old MAQs and spacers from all 3 hives and did an alcohol wash on #2 & 3.  (#3- 4, #2- 7)  The counts were higher than I wanted, but I think they are ok.  At least, I will not be treating again until after the honey harvest.  In #2, we took out a frame to look for the queen (Terry and Karen have never spotted their queen) and found an uncapped queen cell.  It had royal jelly in it, and since it was at the bottom of the frame, I figure it to be a swarm cell.  The edges of the cell go a little bent when taking out the frame, but I do not expect that will be a problem.  We did not look for any other queen cells.  So, #2 may swarm in the next week.  If it does, and I see it, I will call a bee guild member to collect it or perhaps it will go into the bait box.  All three hives looked healthy.
Now some bad news:  I looked in the window of Olea's hive a few days ago.  The population looked very small, smaller than I thought it should be even after casting two swarms.  The distal 12 or so combs were bare of bees and there was even an exposed, capped queen cell.

No nurse bees equals a dead pupa
So I went into Olea's today to see what was going on.  I started at bar 13 and worked all the way to the front.  The findings:
1.  Many wax moth pupae on top of the bars.
2.  The population of the colony seems to me ~90% drones.
3.  Very little honey in the frames I examined.
4.  One comb with small patch of capped worker brood and larvae, bar 11 or 12.
5.  No queen spotted.  No eggs seen.
Conclusion- Olea's may be queenless; the larvae I saw are drones.  Of course, things may be ok.  After all, I did not see any capped drone brood.  But being pessimistic, I worry that Olea's will succumb and possibly become a varroa bomb.  So... one of the combs I removed had, unbeknownst to me, been attache to the floor of the box, and it broke off.  It was old, dark comb and had only some beebread in it.  I used the space thus serendipitously provided to place a single MAQ next to the small patch of brood.
To end with some good news:  I checked the nuc containing the secondary swarm.  There was drawn comb on three of the five frames and capped brood on two of them.  The queen successfully mated and the nuc will probably make it.  I could use it to repopulate Olea's if it does not make it.

They're all in the box!

After collecting Olea's afterswarm the other day, some bees were still in a small cluster; this always happens. This cluster was the size of a cantaloupe.   I was going to let them return to the parent hive, make their way to the nuc or just die.  Early yesterday morning, Maidi suggested that I shake them into a box and take them to the nuc- an excellent idea.  I immediately did so.  I put the box beneath the nuc.  But you can take a bee to a nuc but you can't make it go in.  They just stayed in the box all day, all night and today.
Since it was several hundred bees (maybe a thousand) I decided to help them into the nuc. At first I wanted to make a ramp using the flap of the box, but could not arrange things for that.  So, I poured the bees onto the top of the nuc, expecting them to crawl down the face into the door; but, no.  After sometime, I lifted the lid about 1/2 inch and waited.  In short time, two bees crawled into the hive.  So I propped the lid up, went inside and set the timer for 30 minutes.  I took a look, and almost all of them were inside.  I gave them another 20 minutes, et voila!- they were all inside.  I closed the lid and went in for dinner.

Olea's hive casts an afterswarm

This afternoon, while putting in drip emitters, a loud buzzing caused me to look up.  Bees were pouring out of Olea's hive....again.  The swarm clustered about 30 feet from the hive on the vines behind the apple trees.

The cluster as seen from the lawn

A closer view of the cluster

A secondary swarm, or afterswarm, is different from the primary in a couple of ways.  Firstly, it is smaller, and secondly, it has a virgin queen.  This means it takes longer for the queen to start laying in the new hive; a couple of weeks as opposed to as soon as comb is drawn.  (By the way, two days ago I looked into the nuc with the primary swarm.  There was new drawn comb and some capped brood.)

After I had made sure that the bees stayed in the box, I put in 5 frames and moved it next to the first swarm. 

If it survives, I will have two nucs, the number I want.  Future swarms, if any, will go to a fellow beek.