We inspected our hives today; the goal for the Nuc was to find evidence of the queen laying, find the queen, and mark her.
Success!
Though we did not find signs of a laying queen in the Nuc (in fact, some swarm research says that signs of a missing queen include the workers back-filling brood cells with food (pollen, honey, sugar-syrup), and that is exactly what we saw.)
But, there are a LOT of bees in that Nuc, and we found our queen, and marked her (Yellow for 2017); we believe she is mated, based on the size of her abdomen; we have had some rainy days, so that probably explains why she is later in laying than expected (which is also what we found to expect in our research). We’ll continue to feed this Nuc, but we are not going to open it up for another 2 weeks.
In the other hives (Blue and Yellow), it appears that the queens have slowed down their laying; we still see young larvae, and saw both of the queens, but there’s a lot of empty cells…. Perhaps it’s part of the cycle, and we just had a bunch of brood emerge?… We’ll just have to be comfortable with letting them handle this…
