Since placing the club hive in the apiary, there has been much activity. We added a second box onto the hive. During inspections, we found several queen cells being built in the hive, giving an indication that the hive was preparing to swarm. During one of the inspections, one of the queens emerged so we took that queen and the original marked queen out of the hive since there were several other capped queen cells. One cell looked especially nice since it was like two inches long. Both of these queens have been moved to separate new colonies. Unfortunately, we found that the long queen cell was no longer present in the hive, but there were others, so we hoped one of those would emerge and get mated.
Beautiful queen cell
During the inspection last weekend, we found that one of the queen cells we had seen earlier was now open, and one of them was not present on the frame. We were unable to find a queen in the bottom box of the hive, but we did find pollen, capped honey, capped brood, and even a new bee emerging from its cell. Unfortunately, we did not find any eggs or larvae which would be a sign that the new queen did emerge and get mated.
New bee emerging from its brood cell
We did not go into the top box since the top feeder is built so that the bees want to build on it, and since we found queen cells on that built-out comb, we decided to leave it for now until the queens have had the chance to emerge. Luckily, we did purchase new feeders previously, so we will be able to get one of these on the hive soon and not have to worry about that issue in the future. We are crossing our fingers that during our next inspection we are able to find some eggs and larvae.
Open queen cell on frame