We lost the queen in two of our hives back in November, when the queens had quit laying, so we combined the bees with other hives, leaving us with 3 hives.
We added two packages to two hive boxes about three weeks ago. We put one package in Hive #2, and one in Hive #3. Both queens were marked and clipped.
7 days later, we checked on the queens. Both had been released, but we could not find the queen in hive #2.
4 days after that we are checking on the hives, and we see a bunch of bees in hive #4, which is supposed to be empty. We had prepared the hive to receive a package, as we are trying to build up our apiary to get an Agricultural Valuation.
We checked hive #4, and found a bunch of bees, but could not find a queen.
We looked at hive #2, and found a queen along with a bunch of bees. The only problem is, she wasn't the queen we'd installed. This one was unmarked and had both wings.
My best guess is that the package queen was killed by the bees. Then the bees either found a new home on their own, or they were chased away by a swarm.
Since that time, we added two more packages, growing our apiary from 3 to 8.
And, we have caught two more packages in our swarm trap, raising our number to 10.
Our goal was 8 hives before May 1.
And we could still end up with only 7 or 8. We added a frame of brood to hive #4, and they've made some queen cells. We'll see if they successfully raise their own queen. I'm curious to see if she ends up being a mean queen or if other beeks have flooded the area with gentle stock.
The swarms are still in the traps. Will let them stay there a little longer, and then we will move them into a regular box and hope they agree to stay. If they leave, we can do a split or two from our two strong colonies.
