26 Jun 2010
I seem to be missing my queen
When I checked in on my hive two weeks ago, everything looked great. They’d just barely started to draw out the comb in the second super, and I saw a healthy brood pattern downstairs. They seemed to have plenty of space to expand, so I fed them more sugar syrup and went out of town for a short trip.
When I checked in yesterday, there was no brood. No larva. Nothing. The top super was almost fully drawn out, and full of nectar (or perhaps sugar syrup from the feeder) being condensed. I couldn’t find my queen anywhere, nor any signs of her existence.
Maybe a swarm, I thought? But I doubt it. I didn’t see any swarm cells – just a single open queen cell high up on one frame, and even there I couldn’t tell if anyone was inside. I’ve never heard of a swarm leaving just one maybe queen cell behind, though maybe it does happen. Even so, there were plenty of bees around! It didn’t look like a shortage at all.
So, maybe she was accidentally crushed during an earlier inspection? I don’t know. Given the total lack of brood, I suspect she was dead or gone before I looked in two weeks ago, unfortunately. I just didn’t catch it until now, because of my ill-timed vacation.
As Roger and Jim have both told me, beekeeping is always a crapshoot, and that’s what makes it so humbling.
Luckily, someone in our local group has a spare queen that she’s giving me to install today. I’ll order a new queen for her as a replacement, so I still have the expense, but at least I’m getting a queen in there as quickly as humanly possible.
And on the plus side, I tasted some of the capped honey in the second super, and it’s definitely honey. There may be some condensed syrup in there, but they’ve surely been gathering nectar, too! Amazing. I cut off a bit of it into a small container and have been wandering around with it in my bag for the past day, occasionally sticking my finger in and licking it with wonderment.