Ok everyone I have another question for you all! So at the beginning of this spring I bought 2 new 2 lb packages with mated queens. My one hive is booming!! Doing awesome!!! The other have has some capped brood and a few uncapped and about 1/2 the amount of bees. In the weak hive I found about 10 capped queen cells throughout the hive. I haven’t seen the queen during the last couple inspections but as we all know maybe I just missed her. I didn’t see any eggs but I did see some pretty young brood. I am assuming the queen died? The question I have is do I just let the hive do their thing for now and see what happens? Or do I remove some frames of brood from the strong hive over to the weaker one?
Hi Joe, I’m thinking that maybe the queen died or got balled or something, so the colony is making a new queen via emergency queen cells.
If the queen cells look like they were made from existing brood, that would be emergency queen cells.
If the queen cells are made on queen cups, to me that would indicate swarm cells.
For now I would just see what happens. While your other hive is stronger it is still young and taking brood from it could produce two weak hives. If there are enough workers to allow queens to emerge and mate just see how things progress. It may makes sense later to steal a frame of brood but bees are pretty good at fixing their problems. Make sure you reduce the entrance so they can defend their hive more easily while they are weak.
Cheers
Rob.