No Eggs, and Clumsy Hiving

6/10/07



I checked my hive again yesterday. I wasn't extremely thorough as the weather was looking a little spotty (didn't want to get caught with an open hive in the rain again), but I at least got the chance to check several frames for eggs and larvae. I saw capped brood, but no eggs or larvae. So I'm really starting to think that my hive is queenless.

I think I'll leave it alone for a couple of weeks....hopefully by then a new queen will have hatched, mated and be laying eggs. I think I'll feel better once I see eggs and larvae again.

Also, I've been having some trouble with my hive frames, specifically I'm trying to improve my hive handling technique.

Currently my biggest problem is that the frames have these spacers on them that I'm having trouble with. By spacers I mean these lengths of wood about the size of a pencil. There are two on either end of the frame running from the top of the frame to the bottom. They are just there to make sure you can't take two frames and press them flush against each other (which would of course squish the bees).

The problem I run into is that when I am closing up the hive I have to of course put all of the frames back in. I can only fit all 10 frames in there if the frames are snugly in there (where the spacer for one frame is resting right up against the spacer on the next frame, which is of course the point of a spacer), and I've noticed that sometimes I'll be pushing two frames together and I'll hear this unpleasant ---Crunch-- sound as a bee gets caught between the spacers.

I try to move the frames together slowly, but it seems like the bees don't get the hint and move. Instead they just sit there until they are trapped between the two spacers. According to the advice on bee source if you smoke the bees or blow on them as you slowly press the frames together the bees will scamper out of the way. I'm going to try very hard the next time I open the hive to not squish any bees in the hive.

Maybe this is how my hive ended up queenless in the first place.

Are these queen cells?

June 3, 2007

A very eventful day. I suited up and my wife was standing by with the camera.

The first photo I had taken was of one of my frames. I was concerned by the pattern. Seemed like no eggs or larvae:

On another frame, I blew on the bees a bit to move the bees. Again, not a very good pattern and I saw THIS:

That appears to be a queen cell, front and center on the frame. That really concerned me.

Another frame looked kind of disorganized:

This picture is one of my older frames, it looks more like what I was expecting with a nice patch of capped brood in the center:

Another odd frame, note what might be another queen cell down in the corner:

Yet another queen cell:

A good frame again:

In general I saw lots of capped brood, a little capped honey, and I even saw a bee hatching. However I saw several queen cells and didn't see any eggs or larvae. The eggs are hard to see sometimes, but I would think larvae is usually really easy to spot.

Here are close ups of the queen cells:

I wasn't sure what to make of all this so I went to the exchange on www.beesource.com and asked for help.

The folks on the bee source exchange were (as always) incredibly insightful and generous with their help.

From the many responses I got I generally learned that my situation was one of:

1) My queen was dead, sick, or gone. Possible that she died of natural causes, or maybe my newbie hive handling skills squished her. This theory was supported by the fact that I didn't notice any eggs or larvae and that my younger frames didn't have a very good pattern.

2) The queen is fine but the bees were reacting to the imbalance of age groups in the new hive by creating new queen cells. Essentially the bees think that the queen as failing. According to "Beekeeping for Dummies" this sometimes happens at the six week point and that was exactly the age of my hive.

3) The bees for whatever reason wanted to swarm.

Based on all of this information I decided that if it was option 1, I could either buy a new queen and go through requeening procedures (tricky since I'm still not too good at spotting the queen) or I could let the supersedure go and hope I get a healthy new queen.

If it was option 2 then I could either cut out all of the queen cells or let the queens hatch and supersedure.

If it was option 3 then I could either let the swarm happen or take steps to prevent it.

I decided to wait, and let the bees sort it out. Hopefully I will have a return to normal in a couple of weeks. I'll probably check the hive again in a week and see how things look.

Stay tuned.