Author Topic: Lots of bees, notbrood (Read 2147 times)

Duckhunter39480 · « **on:** April 15, 2006, 05:35:17 pm »

I inspected both of my hives today and there are lots of bees in both hives but I can't find any brood. Both hives seem to be drawing comb and storing honey and pollen. The bees seem contented. I didn't find the queen so I can't definately say that the colony has a queen. Is there a problem here? I did see some queen cells in one of the hives but they wern't compoleted and there were no larva anywhere.

newbee101 · « **Reply #1 on:** April 15, 2006, 05:47:13 pm »

Are these new packages? If yes, when were they installed?

Understudy · « **Reply #2 on:** April 15, 2006, 06:46:29 pm »

Sounds like you need a queen.

TwT · « **Reply #3 on:** April 15, 2006, 08:43:36 pm »

Duckhunter39480, I had a hive like this a few weeks ago, found a open queen cell and check it for about 2 weeks and nothing, no eggs or larva and the bee's had become some what hot, on the second week I put a frame of eggs in the hive and they never drew out a queen cell, then I went out the start of the 3rd week to inspect 1 more time and I was going to use this hive as a queen cell builder but when I inspected the hive it had about 8 frames of larva and eggs, the new queen been working overtime, you should inspect every frame and make sure you don't have a cell that a queen hatched from, she could be in there, just with any bad weather and mating flights she just might not started laying yet..

Jack Parr · « **Reply #4 on:** April 16, 2006, 08:35:25 am »

Quote from: Duckhunter39480

I inspected both of my hives today and there are lots of bees in both hives but I can't find any brood. Both hives seem to be drawing comb and storing honey and pollen. The bees seem contented. I didn't find the queen so I can't definately say that the colony has a queen. Is there a problem here? I did see some queen cells in one of the hives but they wern't compoleted and there were no larva anywhere.

The bees lived and watch out, the keeper might die :!: :P

Duckhunter seems like, from your description of hive activity, that your hive swarmed :?: Lotsa bees, no brood. After lotsa bee and brood prior.

You will almost always find queen cells and they will seem polished and unused. I was just in your duckboots and my experience is that the bees swarmed :!: I still have lotsa bees :!: That threw me off for awhile until I analyzed the problem, with some help but not from here.

I had done some frame manipulations hoping to stall any swarming activity because I wanted to pull some brood frames from that hive to install in some new nucs but I didn't get the nucs until yesterday, April 15. We, here in the southern part of the country, are way advanced in the season due to the lack of cold weather. I was seeing this happening because I have honey I could extract RIGHT NOW.

I found a queen in my hive, caught her, ( check out my post on FINDING DA QUEEN ) and she is now in the house in a plastic ice cream container for observation.

I bought some new queens and they are now installed, in that hive and others.

A fellow beekeeper had the exact same experience and we found the queen cell with the closure wax flap still attached. The bees had swarmed but produced a new queen which he removed and he also requeened. He had lotsa bees left also.

Well ya live and ya learn.