Hello! Me again, hoping to get some thoughts and advice. These photos are from my inspection of my second hive today. They were installed from a nuc about 3 weeks ago. On my last inspection I had a sneaking suspicion they had lost their queen - mainly because I couldn’t see any eggs. A few larvae, but no abundance of eggs, like I have in newly drawn comb on my first hive. The bees are laying down comb well, but do we think the absence of eggs in these cells mean no queen?
I couldn’t find any queen cups/cells either - nor could I visually spot the queen.
In this case, would it make sense to try and introduce a new mated queen quickly? And theoretically - if I did this and the original queen was still in the hive, what would happen?
There’s definitely brood in there (this hive has maybe 6 out of 10 frames fully drawn out and filled - and a few larvae, just not an abundance of eggs and larvae like in my first hive (installed a week before this one), so my concern is that the queen left/died a week or two ago. When I look at the new comb on my first hive, there are eggs in tons of cells - super easy to observe.
I wouldn’t be looking for eggs in the new comb so as to determine whether the colony is queen-rite, or not… I would be looking at what’s happening in the brood frames that came with the nuc. If the colony lost it’s queen, they will build emergency queens in that brood, in order to replace her. That is assuming there was fertile eggs or very young worker larvae present in the frames.
If there is any doubt about a colony being queen-rite, I would always give the colony a frame with those resources, so that they can make a new queen, if they need to. You can call it “a test frame”. That’s a much better option (in my view) than purchasing a new queen.
