After a very eventful 1st year of beekeeping, I went to check on my hive and found 12 capped queen cells and several uncapped queen cells. So this is a new mini hive that I purchased in July and they had several frames of honey and brood at that time. They kept making brood but quickly ate their honey, despite me feeding them sugar water. Since this is my first year, I know that I won’t get honey so my priority was to keep them alive during the winter, so I feel ok about feeding them sugar water til things freeze here. I am located in Utah and we usually start seeing freezing temps in October, so we have maybe a month and a half left. And now I have 12 freaking queen cells and have no idea what to do. They have plenty of room in their hive because they ate all their honey. I did not see a queen, but I saw teeny larvaes the first day I discovered the uncapped queen cells.
Do I split? Do I leave all 12 queen caps? Do I cry? All of the above?
If you haven’t spotted the queen or evidence of a laying queen (eggs, larvae) then it could be the bees creating supersedure cells.
If you’ve established that they are supersedure cells then I’d leave them.
If they are swarm cells, then it would be wise to take some preventative action.
There is some good literature on how to identify the above in other threads.
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Are those cells being used? A larvae in them? Don’t panic, if all the cells have larvae in then then the first to emerge will kill the others - such is life. It actually sounds like you have had a swarming event and maybe you missed the signs. Probably too late to do a split so I would feed them 2 sugar to 1 water by volume so they can build up stores for Winter.
It is unusual for a mini hive to swarm, but bees are unpredictable sometimes.
Your realistic in not expect honey in you first year, that would usually be a bridge too far.
Cheers
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So there are 12 that are capped and are used, there are several that are not capped but have larvaes in them. It’s so weird to think they possibly swarmed because they had so much dang room in there after they ate all of their honey. So weird!!
Look like swarm cells to me on those mini frames.
If it was a normal sized hive I’d say split and feed but…
I don’t think that sized hive would survive too many cast swarms coming into cooler weather so perhaps cull most of the queen cells and feed feed feed?
Do you have a fall flow in your area?
