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What to do?

990 Views 2 Replies 2 Participants Last post by  MoralChaos, 
M
Wanted to get the advice of this group on something. I have a hive that overwintered this last year and has been doing pretty well this year although not as well as last year. Early on in the year I noticed that the bees were back filling the brood area and that the second deep on the bottom was basically untouched so I reversed the deeps. A month or so later the bees had started back filling both deeps and so I added a super and checker boarded the deep with the most brood in it. A month after that I noticed that the bees hadn't touched the super but were still back filling the brood area. I decided to try something different and placed the super between the two deeps in hopes that they would fill that up instead of the brood area. Today when I did an inspection it appears that the bees are filling the super even if it is in the middle. Success, except there are only three frames of brood and. . . .surprise, a queen cell on the bottom of one of those frames. I did manage to spot the queen. She looked small and though I have never seen it I would guess she is about the right size to fly off in a swarm. There was only a single queen cell and by the looks of it will be capped in less than 24 hours or so. So, after that long explanation, I'm wondering what some of you more experienced beeks would do at this point. Thoughts? Sorry this is so long. I like to give the whole picture.
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F
remove the frames that are capped honey frames and replace them with new frames . then you can extract the honey from them. as well freeing up some room for the queen to lay. also you can take the frame with the queen cell and bees place in a nuc with two more frames of honey with bees too and add two empty frames as far as one queen cell goes I'm surprised there's only one queen cell your not feeding.
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M
I removed the queen from the hive and placed her in a nuc along with 2 frames of bees and brood. Hopefully if the bees were thinking about swarming this will make the remaining bees in the hive and the bees I moved think it happened. I'll give an update in a month or so on the progress.
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