I have three colonies. C1 and C3 are drawing comb on the frames in the upper brood chambers I installed on 5/17 so well that I didn't even bother looking into the lower box on C3. Lots of brood in both of these. The population explosion is right on time in those two hives.
As far as C2 goes, I saw one
huge drone, could not identify a queen and there were some capped cells but they were up near the top of the frames and were capped white, not the nice gold color caps I have seen on brood thus far in all of the hives. As I understand they will store nectar or syrup near the top of a frame. Near the middle and bottoms of the frames I saw some glistening substance at the bottom of those cells but did not see eggs or larvae. I also saw a recently exited drone cell. It was not downward pointing but was bulbous in shape and came out horizontally from the frame.
Here is a link to a pic from 5/08 containing what myself and several others in the forum thought were queen cells, could these have been drone cells? Why would drones be produced when there is no queen to mate? (if indeed that was the case)
http://forum.beemaster.com/index.php?topic=9330.msg59761#msg59761could these have been drone cells and that for some reason the queen I installed with the package was injured or for some reason stopped laying? As of today, 5/28, I see no brood at all. I'm going to requeen tomorrow.
Two questions:
1.) If there is a queen in there, she is obviously weak and not laying. What will happen when the new queen is released into the hive?
2.) If there is a laying worker, what will happen when the new queen is released into the hive? I seriously doubt that either case is the scenario but I'm just trying to cover all the possibilities.
I'm almost sure the colony is queenless though.
Any advice is greatly appreciated!
:-D
EDIT: When I insert the new queen tomorrow, I will be also adding a frame of brood from one of my other hives.