The queen bee is dead

Hive #1 - The queen I put into the hive in its cage is dead. That is a waste of $30, plus costs of going to get the bee. Oh well. It could have been worse. One of my friends, or I should say a friend of a friend, had the bees in a brand new nuc swarm the next day. It's difficult to understand some of this...but not so difficult to understand why some people don't continue beekeeping. It's a rather expensive start-up. These issues I've had are not uncommon...not at all!

My latest plan is to wait for the bees to make a new queen. If bees live in the wild all on their own, they can make their own queen. I need to go in and fully inspect the hive to look for eggs to see if there might be one now. I just don't want to disturb them so I'm not sure if I'll go into the hive quite yet. It's getting close to a month since I realized I no longer had a queen so perhaps they have one or are close to having made one on their own. I don't think so yet based on the lack of pollen gathering.

 I keep observing the hive almost daily and haven't seen enough pollen gathering. Yet when I looked into the hive yesterday to ensure the queen got out of her cage, and found her dead, I did see the few frames I looked at with uncapped pollen on them. So some bees must be gathering pollen but I saw none yesterday and only a few bees loaded up with it a few days ago. I think the outside activity is a good indicator of what's going on inside...or not going on inside.  

Hive #2, the new hive, needs to be opened up. The front entrance still has the entrance reducer on. I need to now allow the full opening so the bees can more easily get in and out. Bees were coming in yesterday, I noticed, and it looked like a traffic jam out there. I'll do that today.

 I also want to check how full the deep hive is at this time. It's been a month and the bees had 5 frames to fill up. Once they get to two frames that are still empty, I'll add a super to give them room to grow. I only want to use supers on that hive since they are shorter and lighter.  Manipulating deep hives was too heavy for me to manage alone.  I couldn't lift them last year so had to figure out a way to slide them over. So I'll probably   add two supers to equal one deep hive. I want them to grow numbers of bees right now so they need that additional space to grow.

Let me just add that this new hive looks like #1 looked last year.  Healthy, busy bees intent on growing and producing. It's fun to watch them.  I am looking forward to seeing both my hives looking like this one does right now!