After a leisurely morning of watching my girls fly around, I decided to open the hive and check things out. Found two empty queen cells(near the top of two different frames)and then found the marked queen going about her business. Just then, my son said "There's a big bee" and pointed to another queen on the opposite side of the frame with the marked queen. The new one was scampering about very quickly and, within a second or two, she met with the marked queen. It was kind of ho-hum. The new one kind of ran over the top of the existing queen and kept going. Later, we found her on the hive body still moving quite quickly.
So...now what. I checked the rest of the hive and buttoned it up. I figured that I'd let nature take it's course and in the meanwhile I'd post what I found here.
As for the condition of the hive, things looked pretty good. I still have a "slow" hive but I started moving outer frames closer to the inside a couple of weeks ago and that seemed to help. There's a good amount of open and capped brood...a fair amount of pollen and some honey. Lot's of real dark pollen too, something I hadn't seen yet.
What does everyone think? Let it go and check it later?
Here's the photo of the two queens, side by side. a little blurry but not too bad:
Happens more than we think. The new queen is proably a supercedure queen. They will live together until the old queen dies off, so you can expect to see them both for the next few months.
I agree with that. Can't miss her, that's for sure. She may even be a little bigger than the old one. Maybe I'll pull a frame with one on it and throw it in a nuc with another frame of brood? Really not sure if that's a great idea with the hive already being on the slow side. I think I need all the brood I can get but I'm a newbie.
The new queen sure don't look like a virgin to me. she is nice a long and looks large enough to me to be laying already. I could be wrong, but that is the way it looks to me.
That queen is too big to be a virgin. Queens hatch with a fairly large abdomen, then shrink for about 2 or 3 weeks during mating, then the abdomen enlarges again when she starts to lay. Based on the abdomenal size, she is laying.
I've seen two-queen situations like that
before, but never right next to each other
like that!
Hey, let 'em be.
Let 'em be bees.
I'd mark the 2nd one with a different color
(mix some yellow or red with the white paint
if you want to follow queen-color conventions
and still know which is which)
If they continue to work the same side of the
same frame, you could get some really nice
photos!
If they work together long enough maybe you could start a new strain to breed, think of the possibilities of everyone have colonies with multiple queens.
"Thanks peggjam. I didn't know that two queens would put up with each other. Is the new one a virgin? Will she lay at all in the meantime?"
My observations on mother/daughter queens has been that there really isn't an overall increase in egg laying, at least not like you would think with two queens in the hive.
"Your hive should really boom now with the two queens working!"
Not as much as you would expect. The hive replaced the orginnal queen for a reason, and it usually bears out that the old queen was failing and by the time the new queen starts laying, the old one has drasticly reduced egg laying, and the ones she does lay have a higher mortality rate than a younger queen would. I have not seen these hives boom until the new queen is at full laying capacity. On the same note, I have seen mother/daughter queens winter together, but the old queen generally disappears after a few months.
Any thoughts on how long before a young queen reaches full laying capacity? I'm new at this but I'm guessing that the new queen in the picture was a couple of weeks old (based on when I first saw the queen cells opened to when I saw the queen herself).
With a flow on, they should hit full stride within a month. They do have a learning cruve that they need to go through, such as how to control the number of eggs they deposit in each cell. I find that when you see a nice pattern of eggs with no doubles or triples, that they have hit stride, and are about at peak egg laying. At this point, the less you distrub the hive the better.
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