Bees: The queen is dead

...probably. I got out of work early and did a hive inspection today (6/30). I was concerned right off the bat because the bees hadn't done anything much with the third box. I'm hoping they fill at least 4 boxes before winter. Ideally, they will fill 5 so I can get some honey, but that may be wishful thinking at this point. I don't know if my hive swarmed. If they did, they certainly left behind a good number of bees. More likely, the queen died of unnatural causes. I hadn't seen her in the last inspection, but I saw eggs. This inspection showed that there were a bunch of sealed brood, some sealed supersedure cells and a minimal amount of unsealed older brood.

Given that brood is sealed around day 9, I'm guessing that the bees felt the queen was failing a couple weeks ago. They let her live long enough to give them the resources (an egg) to make a new queen and then dispatched her. With any luck, my new queen will hatch in the next couple days, eliminate her sister competition and then go on her mating flight. I find it strange though. The queen was laying a really nice, dense pattern of eggs. She used almost every cell on every drawn frame. I've read that first year packages like this routinely re-queen themselves 2-3 times in their first season. Given how well she was laying, I had hoped my bees were the exception.

I suppose this is the exact reason why beekeepers insist that you should start with a minimum of 2 hives. If something goes wrong and my queen doesn't start laying eggs, I will have no queen. No queen, means no bees. If I had a second hive, I could put a frame of eggs in this hive for insurance. I'm definitely going to have to do something about that next year.

As an overambitious move on my part, I had brought the fourth hive box up, fully expecting that I would need it. As it turns out, not only did I not need it, but during the inspection I realized that I really didn't even need the third box for much right now. I added the second box when the first box was 80% full. I added the third box when the second box was about 75% full. The bees did draw out a bit of comb in the third box, but really weren't maximizing their space. The first box still had 1.5 frames mostly undrawn. The second box was the same way. Right or wrong, I decided to do something about that.

I am generally inclined to let the bees do whatever they feel is correct. That said, I don't want them to have empty, undrawn frames in their home when they winter over. While I had the whole hive open, I made a command decision. I moved frames around and generally screwed with the bee's world. Hopefully, I did OK. The bottom box now has half of one frame left to finish drawing out. Mostly, the box was full of capped brood and backfilled honey. The second box was a bit tougher to rearrange. I wanted to keep the brood in the center, more or less, but I didn't want to make the new queen honey bound right when she starts laying. When I moved drawn frames down, that left undrawn frames and nectar frames to take their places. I have a bit more nectar in the second box then I would prefer. Assuming the queen starts laying, I'll probably do another rearrangement later to keep the broodnest open and move the honey up. If they had drawn out (without filling) more of the upper box, I would have had more options.

Close-up shot of bees.

Full frame of capped brood.

Looking down into the hive

I watched the bee in the middle chew her way out of her cell. Awesome!