Hive Inspection

We went and did an inspection in 2 hives of friends of ours. Both hives had swarmed. 1 had no queen, but had 2 capped queen cells waiting to hatch...the other had a very active queen. I've enclosed pictures of the 2 queen cells. What is very interesting is it appears there may have been a hatched queen, because the 1 picture shows a hatched queen cell (the bottom of the cell is open), and next to it, a queen cell that appears to have been ripped open by another queen to kill the queen in the cell. Worker bees often make more than 1 queen cell. The 1st queen to hatch will look for the cells of other queens, chew out a spot in the side, and sting the unhatched queen. You see evidence of that in one of the pictures. That queen may not have made it back from her mating flight, or she may not have mated well and was killed by the workers in the hive. Whatever the case, there were 2 new capped queen cells in this hive. They also had 2 queen cups right in the middle of a honey frame! The other hive had a working queen and she was doing a great job! The brood frame is just want you want to see....a great brood pattern, lots of capped brood, and honey and pollen in the corners of the frame.  The last picture is purely honey....wonderful, delicious, HEAVY, honey!

Queenless Hive (No More!!)

So, we got in our queenless hive to see if the queen cell had hatched, and to see if we had evidence that our queen had gone on her mating flight/s, come back successfully, and started to lay eggs. We are SO happy to report that WE HAVE A QUEEN!!! We are so very thankful! This was our 4th queen, and (from what we can deduct), our other 3 did not make it back from their mating flights. We have lots of birds around here that just love to spot a beautiful, juicy queen to gobble up. They are also eaten by wasps, dragonflies, and hornets. It's always sad when you open a hive and know you should be seeing brood, but see a bunch of empty frames, sad bees, and no queen. Although we didn't see this little lady, she is in there working hard. We saw lots of eggs, lots of larvae, and lots of capped brood. I also took a picture of a yummy honey frame. It was a great day!