The latest hive I’ve checked is number 8. It is one of my three weak hives that didn’t have any worker brood during my mid-August inspections. I was checking to see if the frames of brood I’d taken from hive 10 had resulted in any queen cells – I’m not sure. There was a deformed-looking queen cell that may have just been a pile of wax. I did discover a very sporadic pattern of laying in two of the frames in the top box. There were some eggs and some very young larvae (VYL) scattered around the frame – a pattern I’d expect from an old queen, not one who’d just been hatched this year! Perhaps I had laying workers?
After checking every frame in the top box I pulled it aside, setting it askew on top of the outer cover. And there crawling around on top of the frames of the bottom box was the queen! I took some video of her, from which I extracted the above photo.
There were no eggs or larvae in the bottom box, only some pollen. Interestingly, I let the queen go on the next frame I was about to pull. Even though I went through every frame in the bottom box, and even though there were hardly any bees down there, I never saw the queen again.
My questions from this session were “Why was the queen all by herself on empty frames?” and “Why is her laying pattern so awful?”
A possible answer to the first question is that it appeared that hive 8 was being robbed.
When I first began my inspection there were bees flying all around the hive and going in through the propped cover. I’d seen this in hive six a couple of weeks ago so I immediately put an entrance reducer in the front. When I was finished with my inspection I dropped the lid so that bees couldn’t go in through the top. Within minutes the agitated buzzing and extra bees flying around tapered off.
I wondered if the queen was hiding out on empty frames to avoid being murdered by maurading bees. I don’t know. Another reason for her to be off by herself is that she’s just awful and the workers don’t like her. She was huge, I can’t imagine she didn’t get bred. Ah, to be able to communicate in Apis. 🙂