Two days ago when I looked at my hives my main focus was on see how the two swapped queens were doing. Today I wanted to take another look at hive 3 and swap wood for cardboard in hive 5. The swap was no problem but I was reminded that there were only three frames in that hive. I need to put two more deeps in there. The Georgia queen was still there but her marking was almost completely gone.

Hive 3 is another mystery. I really think there is no queen in that hive. I saw a few emergency/swarm cells and destroyed one in the inspection (bummer). Again there was some capped brood but no young brood. I only pulled three frames and after destroying a queen cell decided to put it back together and hope for the best. Another week and the queen will be out if there is one.

This nurse hive (or queen builder) was set up like a nuc originally with brood and pollen and honey and when I moved it, I added a second box (medium) also with some frames of honey and pollen as well as some empty frames. There has always been some empty frames, so I didn’t think swarming was much of a threat. I know a swarm is programmed to build comb, but this wasn’t a swarm and I thought they would be happy with more frames with stuff on them.

It is still possible that there is a queen in the bottom section with eggs and young larvae that I didn’t see and that this hive is about the swarm, so I will be watching out for this in the next few days. On the other hand, if they are queenless, the question is, what happened to her. This hive had one of the new queens in it.