I just performed a good inspection of my Italian hive. I bought this hive as a nuc back in May. Transferred them to a 10 frame hive in June. When I put in a package of Caucasians in June a lot of them drifted to the Italian hive. The Italian hive has a deep on bottom that has 6 of the 10 frames drawn with brood. I added a medium on top of that and they have about 3 frames of brood there. Honey here and there but not a lot. Lots of empty space and undrawn frames but lots of bees. During the inspection today, I did not find a queen but saw plenty of eggs. What I did find was a single queen cell, uncapped, on one of the bottoms of a bottom frame. that has me worried a bit...
I hope its a supersedure and not a swarm.
Sounds like a supercedure to me. If they are going to swarm they typically have multiple queen cells at different ages.
Supercedure I can live with. I would like it in fact because I have such a large population of feral bees around. Swarm would suck because I don't have a lot of time to keep an eye on it right now...
You say you saw an open queen cell. Was there a larvae in it. It may just bee a queen cup. Bees keep queen cups in the hive most of the time and never use them.
Jim
^^Ditto above^^ If it is a cell I would not think swarm. But heck they did not read the same books, at least the ones I read :oops:
Yep. Queen Cup.
You added another box after they had drawn out 6 of ten frames in the deep? The general consensus is that you need to wait until they are at least 80% drawn out in the box before adding a new box. As it is now, you have a narrower, but taller, collumn of drawn comb. I suppose that they have enough time to gradually move over and fill the rest of both boxes before winter. I hope so. Hopefully they will work across and fill the bottom box as they work across the top box with honey stores. I wouldn't add another box until both current boxes are nearly completed.