Just an update on my bees and my thought process of what I found. Hopefully it is a learning experience for all. Please try and get into your hives by the end of tomorrow and report back to us and describe what you found. The weather will turn colder afterward, so it's crucial to ensure our bees are set up for success and left undisturbed during this upcoming colder weather.
Yesterday was the first good day to get into our hives and I did. The first thing I always notice is the amount of feed they have taken. This hive took about half, which is normal for a hive that already had some of last year’s resources. The bees were located more to one side and left the new frames pretty much alone. They wanted to start laying ASAP! So that made it easy to begin closer to the middle. Once I got into the bees, they were very active and two frames in I found brood. One frame, both sides had capped brood and was beginning to cap another frame. She was Queen right, or laying appropriately and no other suspicions. That is all I needed to know. So I closed it and moved onto the other.
In the other hive, there was no syrup uptake. It appeared that I had a log jam of dead bees in the entrance to the feeder. Last week when I checked to see if the queen was released, she was however I couldn’t find her. But it was a cooler day and didn’t want to disturb them further.
Yesterday, I meticulously examined each frame on this second hive and found no sign of the queen, brood, or eggs. It became evident that something had happened to her. Humm panic sets in. These bees have been in the box for two weeks and taken perhaps three days before that. Their life is about half over even for the younger bees. Do I have a enough time to requeen? Or should I combine the two hives and split them later? I gave a Dave a quick call and talked about it. We decided that requeening would be the way to go since they have resources left over from the previous year’s hive. They won’t need to forage as much and should have the ability to take care of the queen and subsequent brood.