Scott- "So if you have laying workers, what did you do to get them to accept the new queen?
They will be desperately trying to kill her through the screen if its a wood cage, and openings if it is a plastic cage.
You should have been adding frames of open brood from other hives, swapping drawn frames in their place so the queens could lay in them to reduce the number of laying workers.. DONT let that queen out of the cage until you are sure they have accepted her.
And perhaps, I have misenterpreted what is going on entirely... JUST getting my coffee going....
Well... poop... I thought the bees would be delighted to have perfumed queen in there... DANG! This situation is a first for me.
Okay, she's in a Benton cage, wooden, she's been in since Saturday afternoon, probably still in there.
This years history. If I would have had my three main hives that survived the winter intact I would have been able to do that. Hot hive bit the dust. Mother hive went queenless for some reason. Hive #2 swarmed and left the hive without any brood at all, I don't understand that. So my main 3 hives don't have any resources to offer.
All is not lost though. What I do have is two nucs, which are turning into hives, and one swarm hive, and mother hive hopefully has eggs in there now. They are all doing fine. Because these nucs and swarm hives are so new, I didn't think these hives had enough open or capped brood built up to swipe any from them. I mean, all three of them have around 2 frames of brood only.
I hope all this made sense. What should my next step be?