19th June

It’s been a few weeks since we’ve posted – I was out of town last week, visiting my family and friends in Colorado. Before I left for the Mile High State, a couple of weeks ago on June 19th we looked into our hive and we saw what we thought was a queen cell on the bottom of a frame in our second hive body, and we didn’t see any eggs in empty cells (we did see some eggs however, when we reviewed our photos from that inspection). Swarm Cells are typically on the bottom of the frames, a new queen will emerge from them, and the old queen will leave with around a half of the bees in the hive to find a new home in a swarm.

This looks like a not fully formed swarm cell.

We haven’t seen our queen in the last few times we’ve been in our hive, and that coupled with the sparsity of eggs, and queen cells we’ve seen make us think that perhaps our colony is feeling a bit squeezed – and wanting to swarm. The hive was mad at us by the time we reached the bottom box so we didn’t get a chance to look over it as throughlly as we wanted to.