5/18 Inspection

It had been almost a week since I spotted the young queen in my struggling hill hive.  My goal for this inspection was to check on her progress.  Also I need to perform a general checkup on the pink hive to see how they're doing with the additional brood space I'd given them a little over a week ago by removing their queen excluder to their med super. This inspection was performed fairly early in the morning, about 9am, and the sky is pretty overcast- they're not super active out front, so I suppose there will be lots of bees home.

Hill hive - they still have some capped brood on the transplanted frame.  They still haven't drawn comb on the outermost frames (outer two on one side) and there were a number of SHB in the empty space.  There's a beetle blaster with canola oil out there, but only one beetle carcass inside.  Perhaps I need to move this inwards  by a frame to bring it closer to the action - cede the outermost frame to the beetles for the moment :(.  Anyway, I still don't see any signs of a laying queen and this time I didn't spot a queen, so my optimism from last inspection is a bit bruised.  That being said, if she's still alive and didn't die on her mating flight beekeeping math says there's still a chance.  According to the table on Michael Bush's website it looks like the time between the queen's emergence and her start of laying is 12 days plus or minus 5 days each way.  So it was 5/10 that I noticed the bees were tearing down the queen cells and decided to transplant the brood frame from another hive.  Then it was 5/12 that I spotted the new queen.  So here's a possible timeline for her progression, again based on Michael Bush's Queen Rearing Page:

1. Emerge 5/10 or thereabouts (this is when I saw the queen cells being torn down)
2. Harden for 2 or 3 days (5/10 - 5/13)
3. Orientation Flights for 2 or 3 days (5/13 - 5/16)
4. Mating Flights for several days we'll say 4 - (5/16 - 5/20)
5. Start of laying (5/21 - 5/23) - 12 days would be ~ 5/22 margin of error is 5 days either side
6. Then it would be another 3.5 days for any eggs to hatch and a couple more days until easily visible larvae.

So this means I should start seeing larvae by the end of the month.  In the meantime it would be reassuring to see the queen again - I didn't see her on this hive inspection on 5/18.

Pink hive - these ladies are doing well.  They're expanding the brood chamber up into the medium super I've given them- I saw a number of eggs up there.  The population seems strong and I spotted the queen in the deep  box.  I didn't inspect every deep frame, but on one I did notice some open cells on the bottom of the frame.  I'll need to keep an eye out for swarm cells, even though based on how much room they've got I wouldn't expect them to swarm.  I have stopped feeding them 5/16 so that I can do a shake for nectar flow on 5/21.  I hate feeding them, but it's still not clear to me that we have a flow going on- they're certainly happy to take the sugar water.  At this point though, they've stored enough sugar water that I they should be able to survive on stored without feeding regardless of nectar flow for at least a while.  This pink hive has drawn comb on pretty much every frame I've given them, so they don't need the energy to draw comb anymore.  I just don't want to push them into drawing comb on a foundation-only honey super unless there's actually a nectar flow (duh).  It's worth mentioning that there's still some SHB in this hive, though with their greater population this hive seems to be coping - they driven lots of the little buggers into the beetle trap.