[John Scifres]

I am pretty sure I have a queenless hive that swarmed on May 3rd and again on the 13th. I caught the first swarm but not the small secondary one. It has a lot of bees, tons of honey and no eggs or brood. Currently it's 2 deeps and a super, almost full.

According to the Bush Bee Math I should have a laying queen by 4 weeks after the primary swarm. That's the 31st for this one.

When they swarmed I made up a nuc with a couple queen cells and it has done well. I put it in a full deep earlier in the week and the queen is laying eggs.

I know I could buy a new queen or add some eggs and brood and let them make their own.

I might like to try to combine the successful nuc hive with the queenless one. How do I go about that? Newspaper with the deep from the nuc hive on top of the 2 deeps in the queenless?

What options am I not thinking about?

Or maybe just catch that queen and introduce her? Then let the nuc hive do their thing making a new queen. If I had my druthers, I would like the original hive to succeed. It seems to be making a surplus of honey right now and I wouldn't mind getting some.

Thanks for the help. This forum is great!

 

[Vance G]

I would follow your instincts and combine. You might as well extract the super, the bees have an overstocked nest already. If you set the nuc on top of the old brood nest, the bees are going to move a lot of honey up if there is somewhere to put it above the new queen. If it is not fed sugar and medications, that is not a bad thing. Just make sure they have a super to take it or you will have another swarm.

If the deeps are not contaminated with fed sugar or medications, it would serve you well extracting at least one of them if they are plugged with honey. You might extract anyway and save it for feed.

 

[Wolfer]

I would give the queen a few more days. I nearly always have eggs in 30 days but I have seen it take 34.
I guess it would be less from swarm date. If you put a frame of eggs in and they don't start queen cells then there's a queen in the hive.

If a hive has to make another queen the population really falls off before her first brood starts hatching.
What I've done in the past is take an empty frame and swap it for one with eggs/ young brood. Once the queen gets it layed up swap it back out for an empty.

The queen in the nuc can lay more eggs than she has room or bees to cover. If you take the frames as eggs it's not much of a drain on the nuc and will help keep your hive population up.

 

[burns375]

I would wait a few days. Its possible the secondary "swarm" was a mating flight or oreintation flight of the new virgin. Another way you can tell without finding the queen, is take a look at where the brood nest use to be, especially in a big hive during the flow. They will fill up the brood nest with honey before drawing new comb. So If there are good amount of open polished cells in the center brood area, most likely they are clearing them for when the mated queen begins to lay.

You can also take the queen and put her in a cage and see how the bees react to her. Thats not always a perfect test

 

[John Scifres]

I looked through the nuc hive and there are 2-1/2 frames of brood/egg/food and 4 frames of nectar. So I can't take a frame of brood from that one.

I have another hive that was the swarm from the original hive that I am sure has more. Gonna check in a bit.

 

[John Scifres]

I went through the swarm hive and it is doing great. I found a frame of eggs/brood to donate to the "queenless" hive. So I smoked it real good and was able to get in without making them too grumpy. Low and behold, as I was searching for which frame to replace, I found eggs. I had my better reading glasses on and found a nice patch pretty quickly. So all is well I guess. Looks like they are still cranking on the honey and I might get my first harvest soon So yet another lesson learned. Now all 4 of my hives are queen right and drawing comb and making babies and honey. Happy happy!