After discussion yesterday I decided to throw few medium frames in this morning. However when I went to the hive the bees were acting a little unusual, at least not how I thought they'd act. When I opened the box they didn't seem amiss at first glance. It was 645 so it was a little early but plenty of light and my other hive was busy flying in and out.
I noticed a handful of dead bees around the ground of the new swarm when I got home yesterday and when I opened it this morning there were dozens of dead bees laying in the bottom. When I moved the frames to add mediums between the deeps I found only one frame with comb being built and when I watched the bees they were acting listless, didn't seem to be doing anything.
I was concerned that perhaps something had happened to the queen during relocation and they're queenless so I decided to take a frame of eggs from my other hive. This brings me to my next new experience. Up to now this hive has always been docile and chill. I often wear gloves but never have I worn a suit with them. When I popped the lid I went to give a little smoke and immediately started getting bumped, something seemed different about them and I decided to put a suit on just in case. I also couldn't find my normal thinner gloves I wear so I put on a pair of thicker insulated work gloves, the type worth rubber fingers and palms often used in gardening and construction. Holy crap I'm glad I did.
I don't know if it was the time of day, adding the swarm to the box 10 feet away, or something else but that hive was NOT happy I was there. I was in a cloud of bees writing seconds of popping the inner cover with bees hitting my hands every time I moved, hadn't even pulled frames yet. They were stinging the gloves left and right (literally and figuratively). Plenty of capped brood and larva in there too, plenty of honey.
I guess I was taken aback by their response but I ended up probably making the wrong decision. I was already running late for work and wasn't finding eggs quickly so I ended up closing both hives but hadn't found eggs to put in the swarm box. Hopefully there's a queen in there but only time will tell now. And hopefully it was just a weird incident with the hive that was so aggressive with me and they haven't turned mean.
This does make me wonder now though. Two weeks ago I was sitting observing the hive and have never been bothered before but one suddenly flew over and stung me next to my eyebrow. Makes me wonder if temperament was starting to change then. That was about a week after finding and marking my queen and the hive had been completely docile through the process of inspection and marking.