I recently was given two hives to take care of... happened sort of suddenly and I wasnt given much experience with the bees- I have been reading as much as I can, but im a student and its hard to have time- but now find myself with a problem!
I think one of the hives was crowded- so I put an empty super on top. BUT- I found queen cells with larvae in them near the bottom of some frames. Are these because of crowding- (it doesnt seem like their are that many bees, but maybe not enough room for honey production) Should I let them hatch and leave with much of the hive, or should I try to get rid of them.
Any help would be great- thank you.
i would let them be. again, i only get to put in a 1/2 cents worth....
sounds like you don't have time to mess with them. you probably don't want to have to search for a queen and then decide about requeening. you probably don't want to have to buy queens and try requeening.
i you let them do their own thing, chances are they'll make it right. if you mess with them, you will have to make it right. sometimes that really hard to do :-)
check later and see what they have done.
If they are crowded and the queen cells are on the bottoms of the frames, I'd do a split. Leave some queen cells in both halves and add an empty box (with frames of course) to each half. That way they have a lot more room and each will end up with a queen.
MB's advice is very sensible, use it. What ever you do, don't destroy the queen cells--you could end up queenless. A hive will often swarm several days before the new queens hatch so removing the queen cells means you might be removing the replacement queen. Also, the bees will start starving the queen to make her stop laying eggs and become slimmer for swarming purposes so don't panic if there is no brood in the hive the next time you look.
Even with a split it is possible for the split with the original queen to still swarm when the queen cells hatch.