Opened up the hive today, and sadly there are still no new eggs. There are plenty of bees, comb, honey, and pollen, but not a single egg. One thing that can happen once the queen has been gone for some time is that the worker bees start to lay eggs. These eggs are unfertilized, and can only develop into drone bees. These eggs are laid in a spotty pattern, often several at a time in one cell, and not at the bottom of the cell (since the workers have shorter abdomen, as compared to the queen). I haven't seen any of these types of eggs either, so there still is the possibility that there is a new queen inside the hive who has yet to start laying (either because she has not mated, or she isn't very strong).
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| Clusters of worker eggs |
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| Relative sizes and abdomen lengths of bee castes |
Last weekend I reached out to a local bee shop in my area, Crystal Bee Supply, about what to do about my eggless situation. They suggested that I wait out another week to give the virgin queen time to mate and start laying--with the wet weather we have had, they said it could take at least 3 weeks. If I were to install a new queen with one or two virgin queens in the hive, they would kill the new queen. They said that it would not be prudent to requeen until I was sure that there were no virgin or newly-mated queens in the hive, which requires an extremely thorough inspection by an experienced beekeeper.
The folks at Crystal volunteered to come and do a house call this week at my hive to see what is going on either on Monday or Tuesday, since they are just down the road. Amazing! I cannot wait to have some professionals give me their opinion as to what should be done next. Stay tuned.
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