i don't know if this is a question of spewing of my frustrated thinking. any input is welcome!!
i had 2 hives go queenless late fall. one ended up being the laying worker hive that i shook out. the other i thought i had caught in time and had given 3 frames of brood over the course of a month. with the 3rd frame, they made queen cells and so i thought they were ok. then the queen cells didn't open on time, and some of them didn't look so good. in the mean time, i found scattered drone cells and figured i probably had another laying worker hive. i decided to leave them alone until i got back from the beach.
today i checked them and found a queen...however...i found her near the top of the hive with very few attendants. she ran so fast i wasn't convinced that it was a queen. i dug through the hive still finding plenty of drone cells and found her on a frame full of bees acting as she should. i didn't see eggs or larvae, but i can't see eggs most of the time anyway.
the hives behavior is much better. they had been so nasty that i hated getting into them. i am thinking that i missed a queen cell somewhere and she's pretty new. just mated perhaps and just started laying. my plan is to leave them alone for another week or so and check again. i have never had a drone laying queen. do the frames look the same as with laying workers??
she looks like the black queen that i took the donor frames from, so i am hoping shes new and from that hive.
no capped cells that look like worker cells?
nope. only drone. that's why i thought i was going to have to shake them out. now that i found a queen, i figure i'd better wait :-)
Sounds like a good idea. :)
Keep us posted.
A Runny queen usually suggests an unmated virgin or at least a queen that hasn't started laying yet. I'd wait a week or 2 and see.
that's kind of what i was thinking. the drone cells are what's got me worried i guess. there are tons of them shotgunned through the hive. maybe they made a queen in spite of laying workers? or ??