Yesterday, went out to perform a routine inspection. My strong hive (#4) needed another super....which was great. I checked hive #3 (they have been queenless for a couple of weeks now) to see if they created queen cells from the brood/eggs I gave them last week. No luck. I closed it up, planning to ponder on it later. I proceded to hive #2 (I suspected a would find a problem as this hive was installed from a nuc a couple of weeks ago and hasn't seemed to get much stronger) and realized they were without a queen and no new cells. I moved to hive #1 and realized, they swarmed (I saw found the makred queen 2 weeks ago) and I didn't catch it. But this hive had several swarm cells and an emergency cell.
I closed them all up and went inside to make a call to a local beek as I pondered my options. An hour later I decided to share the extra queen cells with the other queenless hives and cross my fingers. I suited back up and gave #3 a frame with 2 cells on it. I began to do the same thing with #2, but realized that two of the cells in #1 opened in the meantime and the queens had begun destroying most of the other cells. Luckily, I found 2 good cells and gave them to the other hive. I then began looking for the queens in #1, since evidence of their recent emergence was apparent. I found both queens (I definitely found one queen, the other I wasn't so sure...she wasn't a drone for sure, was larger than a worker, but didn't look like a strong queen?) on different frames. Had I had a queen cage or h. cloth to make a cage out of, I would have captured one of them. But it was also getting dark/late, the girls were very upset and I decided to let the queens duke it out. I hope this wasn't a bad decision on my part, but seems like the more I intervene sometimes, the more mistakes I make, so I decided to leave well enough alone.
It was very interesting to see this occur within one hour as I KNOW all queen cells were fully capped and intact when I first found them. Had I not been reading these forums, I would not have known the difference between cells that had been recently opened (little hinged openings on the bottom), and those that had been destroyed (openings on the side).
Sorry for the long post, but just had to share this new experience. I've made some mistakes this year, but am learning so much about managing hives (ie...don't let them swarm and inspect often) in the spring.
Wisk me luck!
Derrick
Topic: What an awesome inspection!! (Read 1285 times)