Adding on to our woes in other postings (laying workers in one hive, and a supersedure queen in another), Our number 3 hive has now what looks like queen cells (which leaves us with just one queen-right hive).
Your opinions would be very welcome and appreciated.
Yes they look like queen cells to me, probably supersedure queen cells.
Fully capped too- which means they could all start hatching any time over the next 7 days. Good way to look at it is a lot of new queens! As it looks like the frames are not fully drawn- and have not much stores to speak of- perhaps you could split them into two Nuc boxes and turn it into 2 hives? Or use one to fix one of your other hives if they don’t come good? By next spring the nucs will be well filled out and have nice young queens? I don’t know Sydney compares but all my hives still have plenty of drones here in Adelaide… the queens should be able to get mated and start laying before winter comes?
@Jeffm? Sound like a plan?
Unless there are many more bees on other frames, I would be reluctant to split what appears to be a small colony. If you have another thriving colony you could split it, cut one of the queen cells out and transfer it to the split.
My choice would be to leave them alone to get on with their supersedure.
Thanks for the responses. I thought the queen cells would be longer, but I remembering reading somewhere that in new foundation, the bees make the cell more vertical than jutting out.
I won’t be splitting as I have four hives, and that is enough for the moment. The hive has a good number of bees and three full frames of honey over two boxes, with some half filled ones well on the way to completion. I shook the bees off before taking the photos which explains the lack of bees. The frames are brand new because two weeks ago the previous frames broke.
I add the circles by using a paint program on the photos before uploading. On my PC, I use paint.net which is free to download and use.
