Bee inspection: missing queen, marked queen

A quick post on last weekend’s beehive inspection.

We added a Ross round honey super to the yellow hive, one of the overwintered ones, to try to get some comb honey. This super has frames with plastic round shapes, in which the bees draw out comb and make honey, then they can be easily separated and packaged as round comb honey:

Ross round super

Next we inspected one of the two new hives. This was concerning: we didn’t see the queen (which isn’t all that uncommon), but also didn’t see eggs. While there was plenty of capped brood, and larvae, nothing younger than a week old. We also saw some possible emergency queen cups, like in the center of this picture. So it’s possible the queen didn’t survive the installation of the hive; either we didn’t get one with the nuc, or she got squashed or something in transferring to the new hive:

Possible emergency queen cup

We’ll inspect again this weekend to see what’s happened.  They may make a new queen, or maybe we just missed her.

A closeup of bees on a frame:

Closeup of bees

Treatment and temperature sensor:

Treatment

On to the purple hive, there was a strange formation on one of the frames; not sure what that’s about:

Strange formation

We spotted the queen; she is even marked, which makes her easy to see:

Marked queen

We also added a scale to the Flow hive. This lets us monitor the weight of the hive, in addition to the temperature, which helps indicate the amount of honey, among other things:

Scale

All four hives:

Four hives

Some removed boxes between the hives, left there for a day for the bees to evacuate:

Four hives