I inspected both of my hives today and there are lots of bees in both hives but I can't find any brood. Both hives seem to be drawing comb and storing honey and pollen. The bees seem contented. I didn't find the queen so I can't definately say that the colony has a queen. Is there a problem here? I did see some queen cells in one of the hives but they wern't compoleted and there were no larva anywhere.
Are these new packages? If yes, when were they installed?
Sounds like you need a queen.
Duckhunter39480, I had a hive like this a few weeks ago, found a open queen cell and check it for about 2 weeks and nothing, no eggs or larva and the bee's had become some what hot, on the second week I put a frame of eggs in the hive and they never drew out a queen cell, then I went out the start of the 3rd week to inspect 1 more time and I was going to use this hive as a queen cell builder but when I inspected the hive it had about 8 frames of larva and eggs, the new queen been working overtime, you should inspect every frame and make sure you don't have a cell that a queen hatched from, she could be in there, just with any bad weather and mating flights she just might not started laying yet..
Quote from: Duckhunter39480I inspected both of my hives today and there are lots of bees in both hives but I can't find any brood. Both hives seem to be drawing comb and storing honey and pollen. The bees seem contented. I didn't find the queen so I can't definately say that the colony has a queen. Is there a problem here? I did see some queen cells in one of the hives but they wern't compoleted and there were no larva anywhere.
The bees lived and watch out, the keeper might die :!: :P
Duckhunter seems like, from your description of hive activity, that your hive swarmed :?: Lotsa bees, no brood. After lotsa bee and brood prior.
You will almost always find queen cells and they will seem polished and unused. I was just in your duckboots and my experience is that the bees swarmed :!: I still have lotsa bees :!: That threw me off for awhile until I analyzed the problem, with some help but not from here. :cry: I had done some frame manipulations hoping to stall any swarming activity because I wanted to pull some brood frames from that hive to install in some new nucs but I didn't get the nucs until yesterday, April 15. We, here in the southern part of the country, are way advanced in the season due to the lack of cold weather. I was seeing this happening because I have honey I could extract RIGHT NOW.
I found a queen in my hive, caught her, ( check out my post on FINDING DA QUEEN ) and she is now in the house in a plastic ice cream container for observation.
I bought some new queens and they are now installed, in that hive and others.
A fellow beekeeper had the exact same experience and we found the queen cell with the closure wax flap still attached. The bees had swarmed but produced a new queen which he removed and he also requeened. He had lotsa bees left also.
Well ya live and ya learn. :cry: