Here is a short update on the nucleus hive I put together: it has been raining quite a bit the last several days, so today was the first day I was able to open up the nucleus hive of western honey bees on the roof of the building to check on it.
I opened it to look for the queen and see how everything is going. When I opened it, I could not find the/a queen and the bees seemed irritated and were moving around a lot. On the comb furthest from the comb on which the old queen should have been, though, I found many capped queen cells. I did not count them, but it looked to me like there could have been a dozen or more. I was kind of shocked to see so many queen cells. Either they killed the old queen or I accidentally did not get her into the hive or killed her without knowing it, or they decided to replace her, or something else I haven’t thought of triggered the decision to make a new queen. Actually, I am disappointed, but that’s the way it goes. I’ll just have to accept what the bees decided to do and go with the flow.