What to do with two capped queen cells?

[mswartfager]

This is my second year with bees in northwest PA.  I have two ten-frame hives - one deep box each.  They both appear to be doing well, but upon my inspection today, in the one hive I found two capped queen cells.  One is in the middle of the fifth frame and one is on the bottom of the sixth frame.  There seems to be lots of bees and eggs, larva, pupa and capped brood as well with lots of pollen and a couple outside frames with honey.  The hive seemed a little crowded to me, so I added an empty, ten frame deep box with new plasticell (no drawn comb) on top of the first box.  Also, I did locate the queen.  She looked fine.  Is she doomed? 

Thanks for any advice on what to do with these soon-to-be queens.
Mark

[Kathyp]

kind of depends on what you want to do.  i just spent the last hour combing through hives looking for queen cell to start a nuc.

adding room is a good thing in your case.  one deep is probably not enough for most hives at this time of the year. 

you can pull those frames with cells and a couple of frames from the other hive and start a new one, or you can let nature take it's course. if the hive was really crowded and preparing to swarm, you might want to make the nuc.  you can always combine back later if you need to, but you really don't want them to swarm.

[JP]

Two queen cells, one midway, one down below. What about drone brood, see any? Before they swarm they start packing on drone brood.

Giving them more space was the right thing to do but keep an eye on them, looking for more swarm cells and drone brood. If they are heading towards swarm mode you may have to do a split.


...JP

[mswartfager]

Drone brood...yes.  There were two pretty large groups of capped drone cells that I recall seeing.  They were about the size of the palm of your hand or slightly larger.  How do you discourage swarming or do I want to?  If they swarm, won't there still be bees and a queen left behind to carry on in my hive?

[JP]

Read this http://www.bushfarms.com/beesswarmcontrol.htm


...JP