A week after Garrett helped inspect my hives, and we saw eggs in my original hive, I looked in again. The queen was nowhere to be seen, but they can be pretty elusive. But the I found no eggs, and only very mature larvae and capped pupae. That means the queen is probably AWOL or dead. To make matters more definite, the vast majority of the capped brood was drones. That means she didn’t mate well, and is thus a dud. Make that a missing dud.

No worries, I thought. I have two brand-new...

selchie

The bees have certainly been keeping me on my toes. After making the “queen cell” split and having a swarm, things got confusing and stressful. Many wee-hour wakings, thinking of what I should have done with this, that and the other thing. I had worries that there were no queens, or at least no well-mated queens in the three new hives. So I did some bee juggling to keep them contented, and eventually recombined two hives into one. I envisioned recombining the potentially queenless or dud queen hives...

selchie