Help – where is the brood ?
Its early April, and the bees are busy. I took the opportunity to inspect them during a period of warmer weather – and found that two of the six hives had absolutely no brood : No eggs, no larva, no capped brood. None. That’s very surprising – if the queen died during the winter, where have all the bees come from ? There were certainly plenty in the hive and they had been busy recently. In summer, bees only live for a few weeks (they work themselves to death). At the end of the year, the bees live longer and will live right through winter and into spring to keep the hive going. But by April I would have expected all the “winter” bees to have gone and the hive to be rearing new bees for spring and beyond.
To be sure – the bees were pretty bad tempered, which is often the sign of a queen-less hive 🙁
So on Thursday 2nd April, I took a frame of brood/eggs from a different hive and placed it into Hive #1 and Hive #9. The intention is to see if the bees “pull” the eggs into queen cells. Eggs less than 3 days old can be turned into queen cells by the bees – which will then hatch on day 16.
That means I need to check whats going on – do the bees raise new queen cells – or don’t they ? And if they don’t – what next ?
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