Hi there, here’s a Sunday morning mystery!
I’ve got a brood in the super situation for you - I think I’ve got it under control but a bit puzzled by what it is and how it happened…
So, a couple of weeks ago we collected some honey from one frame (flow super) and spotted a couple of crescent larvae in it. We checked the hive last week to suss out what was going on and discovered brood in the flow super frames. We spotted the queen and more brood in the brood box, and the queen excluder appeared fine. We also did a sugar shake, no issues (varroa isn’t here yet). The weather was closing in so we just closed it up and I checked again yesterday when the weather was much nicer.
Yesterday’s findings - the brood box was pretty good, four frames of good brood pattern, queen spotted, some honey and pollen, all looking ok. The super on the other hand - four frames with brood in them, a lot of which appear to be uncapped pupae, presumably dead. It doesn’t look like any of the notifiable diseases (from what I can tell) but yeah, it’s weird. I didn’t see any eggs or larvae in the super, so maybe the queen got up there a while ago, had a little egg laying adventure, squeezed back downstairs and this is what’s left - or maybe a worker bee decided to produce some drones? No dead drones in the super/above the excluder though if that’s what happened.
I’ve taken the super flow frames with brood in them out and put them in the freezer just in case (I’ve just replaced them with standard frames in the super for now, until I clean up the flow frames again). What do you think has happened? Also why is all the pupae (almost fully developed, by the look of them) being uncapped?
For context - one backyard hive in Hamilton VIC, installed a nuc from a local breeder in Feb 2024 and going well so far. We’re in the thick of spring flowering but have had a week or two of nasty stormy weather (rain and wind) that may have disrupted things.
