This morning we inspected the nurse hive and found seven queen cells that were capped. It appeared to all of us that they were rather small/short and not obviously filled with royal jelly as we saw with some of the cells in Q1. We decided to prepare places for all seven. I have a nuc, Liz set up a three apartment queen castle, Kristien has several newly built and painted nucs, and I’m not sure what Mel has. This evening Kristien helped me inspect my hive 1 in search of a frame of brood and a frame of nectar and pollen. It helps to have a second set of eyes looking for the queen to be sure she isn’t moved on those frames going into the nuc.
I set up the nuc – call it hive 6 – about 100 ft. to the east of the other hives and faced it northwest. The other hives all face southeast. I’m not sure I got enough nurse bees in that hive. I might need to add some more. That nuc now has one frame of brood (various), one frame of nectar/pollen, one medium frame of capped syrup courtesy of KZ, and two frames of foundation. Tomorrow evening I will introduce the new queen cell to that nuc. The queen should emerge in another day or two.
While pulling frames from hive 1, we found the queen and I captured her in my new queen marking tube. After about a minute in the tube she appeared lifeless. Kristien thinks this is a behavior not uncommon in queens, but it sure looked like she was just dead. She didn’t appear damaged in any way, but all we could do was to mark her (blue), and put her back in the hive. The other bees surrounded her and moved her a bit and after about 30 seconds they pulled her down between two frames. Time will tell if she is still alive. I think I will leave this hive alone for about a month and then look for the queen again to see it it is still her or a new queen.