My husband and I did a hive inspection yesterday. We currently have three hives. One hive that overwintered, one swarm I collected about three weeks ago, and one package we installed about two weeks ago.
The package is the problem. Since we are in our nectar flow they are packing it with honey, but we didn't see any eggs. However, we do have four queen cells. Three are on a single frame and and the fourth is on a frame by itself. We are going to do another inspection today to see if we missed her. But since she was a marked queen and we didn't see any eggs I feel she is gone.
Since we have queen cells I'm not worried about re-queening. What I'd like to do is pull the frame with the single cell and try and raise an additional queen.
When a queen is lost there are several options to choose from:
1. Purchase a queen
2. Pull a frame from another hive with eggs and insert it in hopes the workers will raise a queen
3. *Combine the hive (we've done this with a weaker hive in the past)
4. What's currently happening in our hive-they are already raising their own replacement queen
*combining hives-we combined our bees by placing newspaper on top of a strong hive then adding the weak hive, minus the queen, on top. Once the bees eat through the newspaper they have adjusted to the queens pheromones and are incorporated into a single hive.
What you decide to do depends on multiple factors. Some factors include strength of the hive, time of year, strength of your other existing hives (do you need another hive?)
There is no wrong answer just what works for you.
#TNbeekeeper
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