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| First honey of the season for the bees |
As I continued my inspection it was immediately apparent that things were not right in the hive. Though there were still several frames with capped brood, there was not a single egg, hatched egg, or young larva to be seen anywhere.
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| If you look closely you can see two queen cells here--one of the left half of the picture, and one on the right |
With each frame, the message became more and more clear: the queen was missing, and had been gone for at least a week judging by the stages of brood that remained. Last time I opened the hive I hadn’t seen the queen, and now her absence was confirmed. I was heartbroken.
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| Another queen cell, a bit too close to the bottom edge |
Eleanor was visiting from California the weekend, and with her help we managed to take a few pictures of the frames. Notable were the presence of queen cells, which look like long distended drone cells. I think there were somewhere between 3-6 queen cells, but it is hard to know for sure since it took me midway through the hive before I realized what these cells were. This confirmed that the workers too had realized that the queen was no longer around and were making preparations.
I put in a call to Rick for advice, and sent him an email with some photos of what we had seen. He suggested that I wait to hear back from him before making a move. Options were to re-queen with a mated queen (in a cage, much like during the initial shake in) and destroy all of the queen cells, or destroy a few of the queen cells, such that when the new queens emerge their ensuing fight to the death for ownership of the hive would not be too gruesome. For a new queen to be successful, she would need to survive the fight, be strong enough to go out and mate, and then return to the hive to start laying new eggs. I awaited further instruction, and kept my fingers crossed.
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