Last weekend, we introduced a new queen to our pieced-together hive, having been unable to find any sign of a queen, eggs, or larva anywhere in the hive for more than 17 days. Then, we had robbing, entrance closings, verifying that the queen had been released from her cage, more robbing, moving the whole hive, monitoring the state of the hive and worrying about the wellbeing of the queen while the bees seemed much more agitated and wary...
Seven days after we originally 'mixed things up,' I went in to quickly assess the state of the hive, and opened the hive body at the end farthest from the 'loaner' Langstroth brood frame - where the original top bar stores of nectar and honey were being managed.
And found a queen.
But - it was a queen without the red dot of the caged queen we had introduced, and she seemed much larger - with worker bees doing a very picture-perfect job of attending her, fanned out around her. Ironically, it was also the first time I had visually verified the presence of a queen in the hive.
But - she was on the follower board at the front of the hive, and nowhere near cells that she should be laying in.
Unsure of what to do, and with a mass of now very agitated and noisy bees filling the air around me, I carefully placed the board back into the hive body, put the top back on the hive, and walked away to think.
Now, this could be one of the original queens, out of the five cells we identified after our swarming incident - heck, it could even be the queen that came with the package originally, if she had not been ousted from the hive. Or, it could be the Vancouver Island queen, with the dot having been removed somehow from her back. The two of us went into the hive the next day, in hopes of identifying one or both of the queens in the frames, so we could decide what was going on. We found this:
A capped queen cell
Now - follow me here - I did not observe this cell when I went in by myself, so we cannot be certain how long it has been capped. We know for sure that there was no sign of a queen cup on the day we put this frame into the hive. Research shows that it takes '9 days' for a laid egg to become a capped queen cell, and 16 days total to emerged queen. If this brood frame went into the hive body ten days ago, it's possible that this cell contained an egg from Jen's queen in her hive, that was less than 3 days old, and that our colony recognized as having the potential to become a queen - so they built up the cell around her. Our assumed lost queen may have finally laid an egg in this comb, and then the colony decided to replace her, noting that she was not being very productive (reference the days with no activity in the brood chamber).
Using these same figures, it should not be possible that the Vancouver, caged queen, laid an egg that was developed into a queen cell - simply because there was not enough time between her release and the discovery of an already capped cell.
So, I consulted with Jen, telling her that we had not been able to observe a live queen despite going through the entire hive - they can run from the light and move quite quickly, or hide within the hive body. My next move (tomorrow when Adrian will be an extra set of steady hands) is to physically remove this queen cell from the comb, and place it in a ventilated container for the next few days. I will have to inspect the hive every day to try and determine if there are any new eggs or larvae visible in the cells - to identify that there is 'someone' still laying.
If there is a drone layer (an infertile worker bee), I should be able to determine that no current larvae are capped as worker cells, and should see only infertile drone capping. Brood placement, and the presence of more than one egg in a cell is another tell-tale. This is a problem of its own, as it means that there will be no new workers, *and* the drone queen could kill any other queen introduced into the hive.
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