This morning I went to beek friends house,to learn more about inspecting. we looked at a 2 yr old hive that had swarmed 2 weeks ago,he caught that swarm and has them in another box, the hive we looked at was 2-10 deeps an excluder,and 3 med. We removed. 3 med. and started looking at frames,we found queen on 4th frame, installed frames back in and moved deep to a stand to look in bottom deep on looking at 2nd frame (i was smoking) so i was standing towards front and noticed a lot of bees on landing and wow!!! there's another queen she's running in and out of box,he see her and put frames back in,and she runs back inside,we go back to 1st deep pull out 4th frame and there's the other queen,now both these deeps are full of bees,he runs and gets bottom board and installed. 1st deep and 2 med. now being this hive swarmed 2 weeks ago,is it possible that these queens hatched at same time,and this hive was going to swarm again with new queen
Quote from: MikeyN.C. on May 30, 2015, 03:48:08 PM
is it possible that these queens hatched at same time,and this hive was going to swarm again with new queen
short answer... yes.
Yep, it's called swarms and after swarms. It's also possible he'd lost that hive. That many bees and that many queens it's possible when it was all said and done no eggs or queen would have been left.
they may swarm again. they may not. it is not uncommon for hives to have more than one queen and I usually find this after a swarm. the new queens hatch and don't bother killing each other. or I pick up a couple of virgins in a swarm and they both stay for awhile after mating.
as the others pointed out, sometimes they keep swarming.
splitting if you have resources can't hurt.
Yeah, I actually had a hive raise a superscedure queen last year I could tell the original had a bad back leg. 2 months later they were still each working half the hive laying away. It was interesting. I figured they would have done her in after the virgin got mated and started laying. They just let her hang around. G