Think I lost queen from new hive

[dulley]

I built my first hive this winter and installed a 3# package on 4/14/08 in Cincinnati. It is a pine hive body with real wax foundation.  Everything has been looking good and there are many more bees now.  When inspecting the hive with an experienced friend two weeks ago, we found the queen and there were plenty of eggs and capped brood.  I had two medium brood chambers on at that time.  I opened the hive three days ago, after installing the third med. brood chamber five days before that.  I could not find a queen or eggs and there was just scattered capped brood.  Quite a few looked like drone cells.  They have filled several of the outer frames on the bottom and second brood chamber with capped honey.  They have just started drawing the comb on the third brood chamber.

Should I assume the queen is gone and install another?  Could they have swarmed from a new hive with plenty of space still available?  The brood cells in the first chamber are all cleaned out from their first usage so there is plenty of space.  A person at Walter Kelley told me they have heard of an unusally high number of swarms from brand new hives this spring.  I have ordered a new queen to be safe.  How should I install her so they do not kill her?

Thanks,  Jim

[MrILoveTheAnts]

Hard to know what you mean by scattered capped brood cells. Scattered clusters of brood or literally a speckling of capped brood all over the frame?
Eggs, and the Queen bee for that matter, are usually hard to spot even when you're staring right at them. I'd say look for very young looking larva, the sort that form the letter "C" inside the cell. If you're only seeing capped brood then it's safe to say time to replace the queen.

[Brian D. Bray]

That kind of sounds like you might have had a swarm.  Eggs can be hard to see, they look like tiny grains of rice stuck upright at the bottom center of the cell.  Move the frame around at angles to the sun and see what you can see then.
If the old queen swarmed they took a lot of the stores with them and the queen quit laying about a week before the swarm.  A virgin queen might not show up for 2 weeks, meantime the remaining brood hatches and the beekeeper goes bonkers thinking he has a queenless hive.  If you can put a frame of brood from another hive and see what happens, if they draw queen cells then they did go queenless, if they don't chances are the virgin queen hadn''t started laying at the time of the last check but probably has by the time you recheck the frame of brood so search for signs of eggs and larvae.

It is best to try the frame of brood solution before panicking.