Hey all! I am a new beekeeper and an old organic gardener. Hoping for some input from like minded persons and that is why I am here.
I already need some advice and even though I asked for guidance elsewhere have received none as of yet, so I have my fingers crossed that someone here has some good advice.
I bought two packages and started beekeeping this May. One hive is booming, with bearding on both front and back, even after adding more boxes.
The other hive wakes slower and is certainly not as busy or populated. Still, there are a lot of bees and capped honey, nectar and pollen coming in. So I just figured they had different personalities.
Yesterday morning I noticed a queen and a few workers in front of the slower hive. I picked her up and she was barely moving, I set her back down and she turned and laid on her side with 5 or 6
workers starting to lick her. I came back 10 minutes later and she was gone. I couldn't find her in the grass but the bees were upset and bopping me so I only did a partial inspection. There was no evidence of
anything that would hint at what happened to her.
I came back an hour later and tried to inspect again. I found drone cells on every honey frame, like clusters of 10 to 20, I didn't get to look into the whole hive but I did not see any eggs or the queen and
only one that looked like it might be a capped queen cell, but it was horizontal, sideways in cross comb, attached through two frames and connected to the next frame in the bottom box. So I didn't go further
into the hive for fear of breaking it. I wonder how long I should wait to see if this cell is a viable queen or should I bring in some eggs from my thriving hive for them to make more queen cells with?
I have no proof that there are eggs because there were none in the top boxes, but there were capped drone cells there
and I couldn't go to the bottom box without breaking the only capped queen cell I found.
Thanks for any and all advice.
Cindy