Bee-Surprise at Home in the Process of Managing Swarms

The invited swarm at Tom's house that moved in in response to my swarm lure appeared to be queenless when I opened the hive a couple of weeks ago. As you'll remember from my last post, my plan was to take them a frame of brood and eggs every week for the next few weeks.

I decided to take the frame of brood and eggs from my survivor hive that overwintered as a nuc and has a queen from the Bill Owens' survivors that I own. At this time of year at the height of the nectar flow, I rarely take a hive down to the bottom box. Mostly I look at the top box to see if they need more space for nectar.

I opened the survivor hive and started lifting off the heavy eight frame boxes full of honey. When I got to the next to the bottom box, I thought there was a possibility of a brood frame there, so I started pulling frames. To my horror, the brood frames were back-filled with nectar - no eggs, no brood. On two frames I saw newly opened queen cells.

The top box on this hive contained four fully capped honey frames and four untouched frames to the right of them. This has been the case for two weeks of heavy nectar. So now I know they have been placing the nectar in empty brood frames.

Oh, no, these bees are without a current queen or at least have a brand new queen. Both queen cells had been ripped open from the side, so probably represented the new queen killing her potential rivals.

Finding all brood cells back-filled with nectar in that second box, I went into the bottom box of the hive. There I found more back-filled brood cells but on one frame, I found highly polished empty cells, waiting for the queen to return to fill them. I felt some relief, thinking that the queen was on her mating flights and that this hive was, indeed, OK.

This morning I saw bees flying in with pollen.

I am feeling reassured. But to make sure they didn't keep back-filling the brood chambers, I went ahead and put a new super on above the four filled frames.

The brood frame for the queenless hive at Tom's house would have to come from a different hive.

Queen Problems in the hive

I checked on my doubly caught swarm today.  They apparently had a poorly mated queen who was laying spotty brood and lots of drones. So a month ago I gave them the resources to make a new queen.

Today I checked to see if they had made a queen and gotten rid of the bad one.

No is the answer to that question.

She has a terrible spotty brood pattern.  I gave this hive a great frame of brood and eggs but they did not successfully supercede this queen or perhaps there wasn't an egg suitable or they didn't see the need.

To keep resources available for my hives, I keep a nuc in my backyard apiary.  I made it with frames of brood and eggs from both of my strong survivor hives.  Today when I looked into it, they have a good queen, are drawing straight comb (another sign of good genetics) and have spare brood and eggs.

At first glance this may not look like a blue ribbon frame to you, but it certainly does to me.  There are eggs in almost every empty looking cell on the right side of this frame.  It will be perfect to steal from this hive and move to the community garden double caught swarm hive.

Maybe this time they will find a suitable egg and supercede the failing/pitiful queen. 

My backyard hives are all doing well.  The two packages that I got from Jarrett Apiaries are thriving but the bees in both hives are terrible cross-comb builders.  I tried today to influence them to build their comb straighter.  Most likely their worst boxes I'll put lower in the hives for them to have over the winter and then remove them next year, if they live through the winter.

All of my backyard hives, including the nuc, needed added boxes today, which I happily gave them. 

I'll let you know how the double swarm hive deals with the frame of brood and eggs.