[WhoDey78]

I have two hives and I overwintered them in two deeps. I inspected them a couple weeks ago and one was doing very well with a good amount of larvae and capped brood. Found the queen and observed many bees. Hive 2, on the other hand, was weaker (as it was entering winter also) and I didn't notice the queen. I did see some larva, but not much, and I couldn't find the queen. I checked again today and the second hive only had a few larva and several drone cells. I saw several queen cells, but no larva or eggs in them. I fear it may be queenless. I decided to take one of the frames of larva and eggs from the stronger hive and swap it with a near empty cell from the weaker hive, hoping they would make a queen from one of the eggs/young larva in the new frame. Was this a good idea? Did I just weaken the potential of my stronger hive by reducing the number of bees? The strong hive still had two full frames of capped brood.

 

[RayMarler]

One frame of eggs and younger larva is not as large of loss to the good hive as a frame of sealed brood would be, as they've not spent a lot of stores and time feeding the larva yet. It is still a loss for it, but It is a good insurance policy to give it to the questionable hive, and with a couple frames of sealed brood the stronger hive should recover the loss quickly.

 

[JClark]

Sounds like you may have a laying worker hive. The frame is a good start but they probably won't rear a queen on that frame (with the laying workers they think they have a queen). The frame of brood will start to suppress the laying workers, however. You will need to add another frame of brood each week and, at some point, they will decide to rear a queen. If you don't have laying workers they most likely will start cells on the frame you put in but don't count on it.

I just dealt w/ this in one of my hives. By the second week the laying workers were suppressed quite a bit but there were still a few eggs being laid. I didn't want to rob more brood from the strong hive so I introduced a queen in a push-in cage three days ago. Yesterday there were eggs tossed out on the bottom board and some young workers were dragging out a few old ones (I presume the laying workers). Their personality has changed completely as well. I take all this as signs the intro was successful. Will find out for sure shortly.

Read up on laying worker hives to see what a pain they can be. If you want to risk introducing a new queen I'd suggest still adding brood for a few weeks to increase your chances of success then using the push in cage method. M. Bush has some good info on these techniques on his site:http://www.bushfarms.com/beeslayingworkers.htm

Good luck

 

[WhoDey78]

It worked! I have one capped queen cell and another growing!

 

[JClark]

That's good. You definately did not have laying workers yet. Should be set now. Check on them in a few weeks to be sure they survived mating and are laying but leave alone for now.