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New hives: pictures, report, questions, queen cells?

1K views 3 replies 3 participants last post by  hospadar 
#1 ·
Installed my 2 packages about 9 days ago, opened everything up for the first time today and things are looking pretty alright I suppose.

Looked at most of the bars and noticed:
- Both hives have about 4-6 bars with a decent amount of comb on them (I forgot to count exactly, oops)
- I saw pollen and nectar/syrup (i've been feeding 5:3) in some cells, saw some girls coming back with pollen in their baskets
- Hive #1 seemed to have a little more bees in it, and was a little calmer when I popped the top
- Hive #2 was a little louder when I opened it up, appeared to have fewer (but still plenty of) bees in it.
- I had some feeders in the hives with 5:3 syrup until today, took the syrup out and put in trays of wetted sugar (M. Bush style).

Questions:

My guess would be maybe hive #2 is re-queening themselves? I would think if they were trying to swarm there'd be other brood? Should I take the queen cells as a good sign that they got the old queen to lay a couple eggs before they off'd her?

If no queen shows up in hive #2 (in a couple weeks?), should I transfer a bar from #1 once #1 has some brood?

Pictures!

Hive #1:
Bee Insect Membrane-winged insect Honeybee Design

Bee Honeybee Beehive Honeycomb Insect

Bee Honeybee Beehive Insect Honeycomb


Hive #2
Bee Insect Honeycomb Honeybee Beehive

Queen cell (I assume)?
Bee Honeycomb Honeybee Insect Beehive

Honeycomb Bee Insect Honeybee Beehive
 
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#3 ·
hospadar, did you find the queen? A friend of a friend hived a package the same day I hive a package in a TBH (his was a Lang with drawn comb). Both packages were from the same source. Mine have done great, tons of bees, good straight comb, etc. He hadn't checked his until yesterday, and I was in town so we went to check on his bees. His bees superseded the queen. I did spot the new queen (she looked mated to me), but there was really only nectar and pollen in the hive. We didn't see any eggs, but I can't see them in my own hive without an aid. The bee count was lower than when he packaged the hive. The original queen had definitely layed eggs for a while, otherwise all of the bees would have died out by now. For now the plan was to go back into the hive in a few days to check for uncapped brood, if he doesn't have any he may be in bad shape unless he can get a viable queen right away.
 
#4 ·
Didn't see the queen, but I wasn't looking very hard for her (and probably wouldn't have found her in either case). I'm probably going to inspect today and see if I can spot any brood, it's been about two weeks since package install, at least 9 days since I noticed comb of any size. I'm still feeding my weaker colony (the one with queen cells), but I stopped feeding the stronger one since I saw some capped stores.
 
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