About 6 weeks ago I re-queened two hives. At that time I placed the cage below the excluder and honey supers. Both were clearly queenless when I inspected. Both accepted the new queen. I removed the cages about days later.
I just had time to inspect and found brood and larvae above and below both excluders in both colonies.
How do I go about determining if I have two queens without runing the risk of them meeting?
Hi Francine, you could have just the one queen and a faulty QX, especially if it made of plastic allowing the queen to move either side of the QX. .As the bees readily accepted the introduced queen I suspect that is the case. What is your QX made of?
Normally if you try to introduce a new queen into a hive that is queen rite the colony will kill the new queen. As you say the hive was queenless then I would think the QX is the issue. I only use a metal QX, those made of plastic can sag out of shape allowing the queen to pass thru.
Cheers