supersedure?

[cityboy]

Checked my one and only hive yesterday. Very few bees (about a thousand, I'd say), no eggs, no larvae, some honey, no obvious signs of disease and I could not locate the queen. I did find two supersedure cells. Have they dispatched with the previous queen? Why such low numbers? Is their condition and behaviour typical for this time of year? What does all this mean? Mike

[Michael Bush]

I'm not in Texas, but that's not an unusual population for this time of year here. At least not with the ferals or the Carni's or the Russians. Some of my hives have started rearing brood and are much more than that and some have only a little patch of brood and only about that much. But I'm a lot further North.

It seems like way too early to be trying to raise a queen. But, again, I don't know what it's like there. Are there drones flying?

All in all, my GUESS for your climate is they should be more built up than that and the bees think something is wrong or they wouldn't be trying to rear a new queen.

[Ross]

Texas varies greatly from one end to the other. Corpus Christi will be able to raise queens year around, Amarillo will be a lot like Nebraska. Here, in the Dallas area, most of my hives have capped brood. My weakest does not, but I verified that the queen is laying yesterday. I haven't seen any drones yet, but I have capped drone brood in a few hives. Sounds like you may have gone queenless in the fall. I'd try to get a queen ASAP from somewhere. It's a shame you don't have another hive to combine with until spring flow starts.