Yep, the donor frames were shaken and beeless, and the problem hive hasn’t got a big population so was easy to inspect and didn’t need shaking.
Cheers
Ron
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Hi Ron, if the problem hive still hasn’t got a big population, it wouldn’t hurt to give it another frame of brood, especially if you can find one with plenty of emerging bees.
I have also had trouble finding queens with a small population. When I finally did spot them, their color blended in with the rest of the bees, not like some of the nice gold ones that really stand out.
Check those eggs in a weeks time to make sure they are workers. If you have a mix of workers & drones in worker comb, that would indicate a poor performing queen, which is easy to deal with as long as you can find her.
cheers
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I think it just goes to show that bees don’t always read the same books that we do :). If you have a good laying pattern it is likely that there is a queen there. You will know very soon as they will try to extend drone cells higher before capping them.
Looking at the timeline, I think it might be possible that they made a queen from the frame you added 4 weeks ago. It might have been a single well hidden cell, or they might have torn it down after the queen emerged. If so, that queen would have been mated and just started laying in recent days.
Best of luck with her 
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Ok, so, what is shaping up to be a crap wet spring actually cleared for a couple of hours yesterday so I got to have a quick look.
I’m 99.9% sure there is a queen in there, I gave the brood box two complete sweeps, but to no avail. Couldn’t see her. There is however lots of nicely laid eggs, lots of larvae from small to large, and some sealed brewed as well. The population was good enough for me to add the honey super back onto the hive. So the drama seems to be over. I still have no idea where the queen came from, but she does seem to be in there somewhere.
One of the flow frames that I put back in the super, had a few cells (and I mean only 20 or so) that had very small air bubbles on the surface. I assume this is a little bit of fermenting. Since it was such a small number of cells, I put the frame on anyway. Anyone know if that’ll be OK?
Cheers
Ron
,
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Good outcome Ron. Thanks for the update.
Hi Ron, well done. It’s always good to find that sealed worker brood. Queens can be hard to find, especially if their color is similar to the bees.
I can’t comment about the air bubbles, except that if you remove the caps, the bees will likely clean that honey out, seeing as your bees will be hard pressed to find honey with all the rain about. The bees will still clean it up without the rain.
We’re getting a decent amount up here with more coming over the next few days.
Hi Ron,
Just a thought… were you adding frames of bias with nurse bees on them? If so, is there a chance you could have accidentally put a queen in on one of those frames from your donor hive?
If so your donor hive could now be trying to raise a new queen.
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Hi Tim,
No nurse bees, they were shaken frames.
The marked Queen is still in the donor hive.
The Hive was 100% queenless. There were laying workers and it was a few days away from a slime out. Only explaination is that there was a queen cell in there somewhere at some point and it was VERY WELL hidden.
Cheers
Ron
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There are also miracle cases when a flying queen gets lost and accepted by a queenless colony. Rare but it happens.
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Awesome, I’m going with that Senario… Rather than I just missed it.
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