If you have been following along, you know that I had a hive in Plano that I split into four hives, and attempted to sort out and requeen. One hive, I disbanded and took as honey, since there was no brood. Of the remaining three hives, I had found fresh eggs in the one with no queen cells, so I surmised that it had the original queen. That hive was moved to a friend’s yard in Dallas. I requeened the remaining two hives with B. Weaver queens. One hive consisted only of a shallow super, and the other hive was a deep super.
The requeening went well with the shallow super. But the deep super has been a mystery. A week after I put the queen cage in, I opened the hive to find the cage empty, but no eggs. So I put in a frame containing eggs and brood into the hive on the assumption that the new queen had been killed and that they would create a new queen. Another week passed. The frame that I had placed inside the deep super had no queen cells. They had not started to create a queen. I found only a few eggs in the entire hive, all on the same shallow frame I had placed inside. Since it had been a week, I guessed that the hives were from an active queen. But why so few? Was it the B. Weaver queen, but she was not laying eggs in abundance? Were they eggs that for some reason had not hatched from when I had originally placed the frame, that were now dead? I didn’t know.
The clock is ticking on this hive, because the bees dwindle in number as no new brood comes of age to replace the aging and dying workers. My father didn’t really have any further insight than me. Querying an online community, one old sage suggested that when I had originally placed the B. Weaver queen, the hive probably contained a virgin queen. And that the hive likely killed the B. Weaver queen and she is just not starting to get going.
I have not looked inside the hive since I found the mystery eggs and no queen cells. But since then I have moved that hive (and the one consisting of the shallow super and a recently placed medium super on top of it) to my home for further observation.
On or before Saturday I will check this hive. It will have been two weeks or so since I last looked inside, so I should have a definitive answer on whether a queen is alive in this hive. If so, it would be nice to know if it is the commercial queen I purchased, or a feral recently-virgin queen. We shall see. And if there is no queen? I may just cut my losses with this hive, disband it, and place the comb on another hive. The more experience I get, the less sentimental I become. I have begun to see why farmers are not sentimental. They can’t afford to be.
In the meantime, I plan to move another hive or two down to my friend’s home in Dallas. He is interested in bees and has a nice big yard. I look forward to mentoring him on beekeeping. As they said in my medical training, “See one, do one, teach one.” I don’t much, but I know a little. And that’s a little more than most.
I have been thinking that it would be nice to have some land in the countryside to put some bees. Out of the way, but not too far a drive. A little apiary ranchette. One can dream.
The thought that a virgin queen might have been there and the store-bought queen killed is a good hypothesis. Taking the time to find “a queen” and see which one it is (if there is even a queen in there) will answer the question for sure. New queens can be very skittish and hard to find.