Hello everyone,
We picked up and transferred our first bee colony into our hive about a week ago. We gave them some time to settle down and then yesterday, we did a first inspection (will post a video as soon as it is edited).
Although there were a couple of bees in the super with flow frames, not much activity was going on there. This was as expected, since the colony came on 6 frames and we added two new frames with wax foundation.
We checked the broodbox and all looked pretty good. Lots of capped worker bee cells, cells with eggs and larvae in different stages in them as well, a nice stash of capped honey cells, worker bees working on filling more cells with nectar, cells with pollen, bees have been pretty active gathering pollen en nectar, bees working on building out cells on the two new frames with wax foundation, etc…
However, we did not find the queen. When doing the transfer of the colony, a week ago (see video here: Video: Transferring 1st colony into flow frame hive in France), we did not see the queen either, but did not take a lot of time looking for her, so we might have overlooked her then. And we might have overlooked her yesterday as well, should she have been covered with worker bees.
We did find a couple of unfinished queen cells (3-4, or so). We decided to leave them there, since we did not see the queen and could not be completely certain that there is still a queen. I’m pretty sure she must be around, since we saw eggs and larvae.
*Did we make the right decision by not destroying the started queen cells? (They are still only the round and open beginnings of a queen cell. I’m not even sure if there is an egg in them).
Additional info: we saw some capped drone cells at the bottom of a couple of the frames (still on the wax-part, not on the wooden frame), but no drones. We left those intact as well.
Please let me know what you think.
Cheers!