Proteus Bee Continued

I've been out of town for a number of days and today did an inspection on my hives, so there's lot to report. I've posted about a number of observations in several posts today. First I looked at Proteus Bee, the hive that came from the upstairs portion of Proteus when the hive had two queens.

When I opened Proteus Bee today, I looked at the frames in the top box first. There had been mostly starter strips in this box and the bees are festooning and building honeycomb.

As they build up their comb, they are also storing honey, as you can see from the right edge of the second picture.

The bottom box of Proteus Bee is the box where the bees originally lived in the big Proteus hive. This is where I put the frames of brood and eggs. Today every frame in the bottom box was emptied of bees, honey, etc, as you can see in this picture. I was discouraged. I had not seen bees entering the hive since I returned from my trip.

In the top box, however, they are building comb (see first two pictures) and they have capped and uncapped brood. I did not see any eggs, but did some young brood, but I am not sure there is a laying queen.

There were two opened queen cells. One was open on the bottom of the cell, indicating that a queen may have emerged. The second one, located right beside the first one, was ripped open on the side, indicating that the first queen emerged and then killed the queen in the second cell. However, it doesn't look as if anyone is laying in this hive. I'm not sure and didn't do anything today, but may add yet another frame of brood and eggs on the weekend.

Interestingly, this hive was the upper part of Proteus when it was a two-queen hive. The bees in this hive rarely use the front entrance, but mainly enter the hive through the top entrance. This also makes sense since the bees are living in the top box and not the bottom one.

Still a shape-shifter, like the god Proteus for whom the hive was named, I'll wait to see what happens with these bees. If they don't get more of a running start, I'll re-combine them with Proteus A before winter.