A New Young Queen?

We'll find out if Lavender has one soon.

After a discussion with my Dad on Sunday 7/20, I weighed the numbers, or the dates, I suppose. Under the best possible circumstances, if I bought a new queen for the hive, I might be able to have a new laying queen settle into Lavender by at most a week sooner than if I provided the colony with eggs from Rose.

My Dad explained that a laying worker complicates things, and the bees in the colony might not accept a new queen. If they raise a queen, it's almost a guarantee that she will be accepted and cared for. So, with that potential setback on the back of my mind, I decided to switch some frames between the hives to give Lavender a frame containing fresh eggs and also a frame of brood (young bees) from Rose.

Remember the photos from my last post? I've included one here, but I've circled in red where you can see larger cells that have been drawn out differently:

These are the queen cells that the colony has been drawing out in hopes that one of the eggs laid by the laying worker would be fertile and grow a new queen. Instead, when the bees realized it was simply another drone, they stopped drawing it out (a true queen cell should be even longer - I'll try to take another picture the next time I have the hive open, if I can find one).

The bees will take a fresh egg (or most likely at least a couple, maybe more) and move them into these drawn out cells. They'll finish drawing them out to the right length, and feed the larva royal jelly and these will become supersedure cells. A swarm cell  is done in a similar fashion, but wouldn't usually be found in the middle of the frame. It would be found hanging from the bottom of a frame.

I was concerned that I would create more work for the bees, asking them to grow additional supersedure cells, given that there were already several built inside some of the frames. However, my Dad explained that the bees will choose the egg (or eggs) they feel are best for raising a queen, and move them to the cells that have already been drawn out.

Lavender has been slowly declining, with more bees dying off, and only drones hatching in the hive. So I also pulled one frame of brood from Rose that had bees ready to hatch from it. In fact, I could see the new bees beginning to emerge from a few of the cells. This will help to keep the colony alive a couple more weeks until the new queen is laying.

For now, I can see some bees are out foraging when I watched the outside today, and that's a good sign. When I checked the syrup level in the feeder this evening, there were a lot more bees in the top working around the jar, and this seems to also be a very good sign.

As I am typing this post, it's been about 9 or 10 days since I switched the frames to help Lavender again. In a couple more days, I'll check the hive again, and hopefully have good news about it's status.