Well, it’s official, our hive has a major problem. We looked in our hive on last Friday, and as Rob pulled up the first few frames we were met with some real disappointing sights; there was no new uncapped brood or eggs in the combs. In fact, as we continued through the entire hive were met with the same situation. We have no new eggs or brood, if there’s a queen in the hive she’s not yet laying and we suspect our hive is queenless. Right now, it seems like our hive is dwindling fast we saw a dearth of bees on the frames.

Most of the frames looked like this:

And this:

The best frames looked like this, but there’s still not many bees on this frame.

We also noticed robber bees nosing around the hive, so we re-installed our metal entrance reducer. Robber bees fly around the hive looking for an entry in, they check the seams for holes, and fly underneath the hive to try to sneak some honey from the combs. There was quite a battle at the hive entrance this morning (7/24) between robber bees and guard bees. Bold, would-be robbers alighted on the bottom board, and guard bees would jump on them, and ball them, dragging them from the bottom board into the grass. Unfortunately, by the time I got my camera, the main battle was over, and the robbers became less bold, however, they continue to snoop around the hive looking for a way in.

Here’s some pictures of Robber Bees being dragged from the hive.

Our plan is to do another inspection tomorrow, and see if we can spot the queen, or hopefully some eggs. It takes two to three weeks sometimes for a new queen to start laying, it’s been two weeks since the bees swarmed, but since the population seems to be dwindling fast, our plan is to get at least a queen from a breeder and quite possibly 3 ‘nuc’ frames of brood to get the queen jumpstarted. We will post on this soon.