Ok, here is my boggle...
The past three times I have been in my backyard hive, I have been unable to find my queen. This time, not only did I not find my queen, there were NO eggs in any of the cells, I found only uncapped and capped brood along with thousands of bees. I spent a good hour and a half going through all of my frames thoroughly looking for the queen and any eggs. So, I have hit my first snag.
Can I get them to make a new queen from one of the uncapped brood? At this point, I want to make sure I solve the problem before anything else happens. Any suggestions?
-Dennis
Update: Ordered new queen.
Boy, I sure hope I didn't accidentally kill my queen when I did the cutout.
I don't know what is normal in your climate, but here the queens have pretty much shut down just recently.
In late fall it is normal for the queen to shut down until spring. During the winter she may lay a small patch of brood from time to time to keep the population up if the die off is high but those brood patches are about the sie of an Eisenhower Dollar. Come March and you have no bees, or no visible queen, then worry.
Climate here is still very warm with no shortage of 80 to 90 degree days and that is at my elevation of 4800 ft. (Southern California)
just let them go, you can check back when you want but I would bet she is in there. after you pulled the frames out of the hive did you check the bee still in the box, I had a queen that was tough to find until I found out what she was doing, she would leave the frames when I inspected, if I didn't take all frames out while inspecting she would run under the frames as I put them back in and sometimes run out the entrance on the landing board but wouldn't get back on them until it was closed up, weird queen