With Hive North captured and in their new home, they need to be left alone for a week or two to let them get started building out comb and raising brood. However, a full inspection of the other two hives needed to be completed, so that we could figure out where Hive North came from.
In short, we figured it out. Hive North is the new Hive West. More on that in a bit.
We started with Hive East. We’ve done a lot of inspecting today, so it’s becoming a little fuzzy already, but here’s what I recall.
Hive East is making progress in righting their ship. The lower honey super is starting to fill up, the brood chambers are starting to become empty of honey, and the upper super is starting to get comb built out.
We saw the queen in Hive East! She’s a yellow-marked (2012) queen, so that’s the one we just put in a couple weeks ago. We also saw the beginnings of a brood pattern emerging. I did see one cell that had 2 eggs in it, but the brood pattern otherwise looked good, and the hive is looking healthy overall.
The outer two frames on each of the brood chambers are full of capped honey, and the honey in the center frames seems to be getting moved up into the supers. Hive East is looking well again. It remains to be seen whether they can build up sufficient honey stores to give us any to take.
With Hive East complete, we moved on to Hive West. The upper honey super has some frames that are half-built-out, with a bit of uncapped honey in the partially built out frames. The lower super has about 3 frames that are fully capped honey, with another 3 frames of partially-capped honey, and the outer frames are in the early stages of being built out.
We moved on to the brood chamber. Like Hive East, the outer couple of frames in both chambers were full of capped honey. The next few frames show signs of being honey bound, but there are a lot of open brood chamber cells that are completely empty, with no sign of eggs in either deep.
About halfway through the upper brood chamber, we found what we were looking for (but were hoping we wouldn’t), about a dozen queen cells, some in “swarm” area, some in “supersedure” area, and all of them open and empty. There is a virgin queen somewhere in Hive West. We looked very hard for her, but were not able to find the queen. It’s possible she was on her mating flight, but it’s even more possible that we’re not too great at queen-spotting yet.
So here’s what happened. Sometime around last Thursday (probably on Thursday, but perhaps on Wednesday), Hive West swarmed and landed on the nearby branch. We captured the swarm Thursday night, hived it Friday night, and added 10 frames on Saturday. Today, Sunday, we opened Hive West to find hatched queen cells. So, Hive North should have our white-marked queen from Hive West, along with the younger workers. Hive West has a virgin queen, so we need to wait for a bit to make sure she’s mated and starts laying. That will take another week or two.
I feel a little disappointed that we swarmed both of our hives in our first year. The lesson I’ll take into next year is to put on more space a lot sooner. I read something today that implies that a beekeeper is actually trying to put a hive into a position where it wants to swarm, but manage it to keep the swarm from happening. I don’t know that we necessarily have enough knowledge to keep that from happening again, but certainly there’s lots of evidence that we didn’t give them space fast enough.
I need better hive telemetry. A hive scale is my next project.
So, short status report:
Hive North: Hived, with 2 brood deeps. Check again in a week or two.
Hive East: Recovering from being honey-bound. Marked queen is laying, honey is getting moved and capped. Leave it alone next inspection, and check it again in 2 weeks.
Hive West: Possibly in trouble. Recent swarm, no brood to speak of, probably a virgin queen. Check again in a week.