Today was the first day with some sun in about three days. I have been concerned about one of my new queens and I wanted to take a look. Just to review, hive 1 was the only hive to overwinter. I lost two others. We took bees from this hive to make the queen builder for our first round of queen rearing (Q1). This was the queen we wanted to propagate. At the start of this project, I only had this hive and hive 2 which was a package I installed in April.

After the new queens were born, one was left in the queen builder box, which after another couple of weeks, I moved about 30 feet, It is now hive 3. It should have had one of the new queens in it, but I don’t remember if we ever found it or verified that it had successfully mated and was laying. The other three queens were moved to nucs.

Shortly after hive 3 was set up, hive 2 swarmed and I caught it and installed it into hive 4. The specific goal for me was to replace the package queen before winter. But now that the package (hive 2) had swarmed, there would be a half Georgian queen made in hive 2 and the original Georgian queen was then in hive 4.

One of the other queens made went into a cardboard nuc as hive 5. I waited a couple of days after installing the swarm and then removed the queens from 4 and 5. They were both marked yellow. They went into the garage for 24 hours (or was it 48?). Then I did the swap. I put the Georgian queen into hive 5 and the new queen into hive 4.

The problem has been that after about a week in hive 4, there was very little activity and very few bees looking in from the top. I was wondering why and if the queen was gone as well.

Today I inspected hive 4 and found maybe a couple hundred bees and surprisingly, the marked queen, too. This was bad that the bees were mostly gone, but good that at least the queen was there. I also confirmed that there was some larvae. I don’t know if they can maintain the hive with so few bees, so I hoped to swap in a medium frame of capped brood. I thought I had a better chance of finding the queen in hive 3 versus hive 2, so I inspected several frames in the medium brood box of hive 3, found a couple of perfect frames, but never found the queen. I looked really carefully and decided to move a frame of brood into hive 4. There was also some brood less than a week old, so there must be or have been a queen in there recently. I also found several emergency queen cells and some swarms cells. These may have been left over from the queen rearing. It doesn’t really make sense that they would be swarming. I really hope that I didn’t move the queen over into hive 4. That would be a shame. It was a calculated risk, but I really didn’t want to lose hive 4 with the new queen. On the off chance that something did happen to the new queen in hive 3, I hope that they will just make a new one again. We will also hopefully have some more new queens from our second round of rearing (Q2) within the week.

I still have the original Georgian queen in hive 5 in reserve. I will transfer those frames into one of my new nuc boxes in the new few days. I suppose that I should keep moving frames of brood out of the nuc so they won’t swarm. I can keep adding these to hive 4 if necessary.