Thanks Dawn - you’ve been really helpful.
I’ll pop some images up tomorrow.
Hoping for some positive signs
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I had a good inspection today. On first look I began to think I had a lot of worker brood. Eggs seemed messy but 2-3 looked perfectly laid. There are heaps of uncapped brood and only a few capped here and there. (It looked exactly like Dawn and Jeff described.
A few frames of mostly honey later, i then spotted a healthy mature queen. What a welcome sight.
So, I can relax for now and let the bees do their stuff.
Thanks all for your expertise!
Photos coming.
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Hi Rod, everything looks great. Nice worker brood, nice queen. cheers
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Hello all,
I’m in Colorado and enjoying an early, 14C, Spring day. Decided to dive into the hive and see how they fared over winter.
Well, I found my queen on the ground after removing all frames and boxes to clean the bottom board–she was lifeless
this is the first time I have seen her. I inspected the frames and did not see any evidence of laying nor was there a variety of cells showing varying development of new bees.
As this is my first year my inspection could be suspect.
What do you all think? Re-queen?
do Bee do Bee do, Eric
I would guess that by this time of the year there would be large amounts of brood but you should check with some locals to see about that.
What was the rest of the inspection like? Bee numbers? Stores?
If the rest of the hive looks good then she probably recently died but you would need to requeen pronto.
thank you. The hive numbers are great and there are ample stores. However, wouldn’t the hive set in motion the re-queening itself?
I didn’t see any eggs, larva or recently capped brood.
Nor did I see any queen cells.
They need a frame of bias, eggs and/or very young larvae, to make a new queen.
(Bias=bees in all stages)
ugh! I knew that—thanks As this is my only hive I’ll start looking around for a queen to purchase.
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Wondering what caused this. Have you contacted anyone to come out and inspect? Normally there is a state apiariest that will come check it out. It’s free here. Its important to know what happened! Was it AFB, varroa…? I would call and get the ball rolling. Did you do a mite count going into winter?
Yes, mite count going into winter was 2 and yesterday’s was 1. I think the issue was my clumsiness during the inspection.
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