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.