Member,
The amount of feed they emptied may or may not be an indicator. I very seldom feed due to robbing problems.
How many boxes are on this hive? The best thing you can do for this hive is to reduce the space they have to protect. How heavy is this hive. If it has a lot of honey I would not bee feeding it.
Jim
They are in 2 mediums currently. At last check (Saturday) they had a decent amount of honey, and there are still foragers coming in and out, some with pollen as well. I wish I'd made better notes when I went in there on Saturday as far as what was on what frames, but I had been hoping to just take a quick peek and see a queen cell on the brood frame I'd given them, so I wasn't really in full inspection mode, and didn't take very good notes. If I remember correctly though, they had a decent amount stored, and they were backfilling the empty brood combs with more nectar too, so they are probably alright. Unless of course they were robbed on Sunday.
How many frames do the bees cover in this hive? If its less than five I would consider downsizing to a nuc box. Best to get a queen asap. Clock is ticking. By the time new queen is accepted and starts laying you are probably looking at 24 days minimum before new bees emerge.
I don't have a nuc box, but I could get them down to 1 medium if I had to. When I was in there on Saturday, the population was way more than 5 frames worth of bees, and the 2 brood frames from the big hive that I gave them were approximately 1/2 capped worker and then 1/3 capped worker, so they have had a little bit of a population boost from that. They did undergo some sort of disturbance on Sunday though, and if it was robbing, I don't know what that could have done to the population either.
I'll probably go out and do a heft test later, although I have never done that before, so I don't know how heavy they were, and I don't know how much of a gage it will give me. But at least if the hive is really light, I'll know.