Inspection today sees evidence of a queen!

Last week I did an inspection of the hives and  Hive 1 appears to be thriving.  Today I inspected again and Hive 1 is still just bursting with activity.  I see a lot of uncapped honey and other frames pretty full so I went ahead and added a super onto Hive 1.  They seem to be doing fine with the entrance opening.  In a week or two, I will probably fully open the entrance.  They had a good amount of comb coming off from the bottom of the frame. I took it off.  I also took one of the frames that appeared to have some queens in development.  I moved that and another few frames to the nuc.

Let's talk about the Nuc

Two weeks ago, I moved a few frames into that same Nuc with the queen cell. but I didn't move the Nuc to another yard so when I checked on them, I saw that the bees were gone.  So I left the frames in there, including the frame that had the large queen cell and still closed up.

My intent today was to split Hive #1 and load up the Nuc and take it to another yard this time. I put a frame in there with one frame I found that had a bunch of queen cells in the making and a few other frames of honey and syrup.  I'm hoping they finish making queen cells and maybe I can get a new queen that way.  My intent was to raise a queen for Hive #2 that had no eggs in last week's inspection.
The one I purchased and added apparently didn't make it.  But today, there were eggs!  I was so excited.  There must be a queen in there now.it's more likely the queen I bought laid the eggs but I don't know why it would take her so long.  She came out of the cage on 5/31 and only started laying eggs sometime this week.  

I first thought it might have come from the Nuc since that queen cell now had a hole at the end.  She had hatched and she was gone...perhaps to Hive #2 This queen would need to take its maiden flights, etc. so think it's too soon for her to begin laying eggs.

Very positive inspection today.

May 25, 2017 - added queen to one hive

One of the Nucs I bought a month ago has not florished at all.  It has no eggs.  I thought about letting them build a queen cell, currently in production, but decided to get a new queen so that I don't lose any more valuable time this spring.  I bought my queen for $35 from Charles Andros up in Alstead, NH, making an early morning trip there.

I took out the frame that has the queen cell on it and added that to a Nuc along with another frame that has a lot of capped brood and honey.  I am hoping they'll finish making the queen and let nature take care of itself.

Meanwhile, I added the new queen to the small hive that has only one deep after seeing how the bees were with the new queen.  They seemed ok and not trying to kill her. Hopefully she will survive and I'll take a look sometime this weekend to see if she's out and alive.. This hive has a lot of uncapped honey in it so I also added an empty frame that she can use to lay eggs...but I believe it also needs comb built.  We'll see how things go.

On the larger hive, I saw a lot of burr comb down below so thought they may be thinking of swarming.  I'm told that doesn't usually happen the first year, but I'm keeping vigil so I don't lose these bees to that!

I also did a bit of checkerboarding in the lower deep, adding a few empty frames and move some of the loaded frames to the top deep.  And one of these loaded frames went in to support the new Nuc I started today.