July 7th I took some friends out to show them the hive and to share with them the little I know about beekeeping.
My goal was to remove the queen excluder between the two brood boxes. If they were in fact generating a new queen, she would need to get out to be able to mate.
What did I find? In the middle brood box there was already a spotty pattern of capped brood and larvae.
Two options, either the queen had been released from the cage and was beginning to lay . Or, one of the queen cells hatched, and mated with a drone trapped between the queen excluders. The second option doesn't seem to be likely in terms of the timing .
The capped brood could have been left from the recent queen, but the larvae were definitely new.
I'm hoping this means that there is a mated queen who is just starting to lay. IL
Either way, I will leave this box alone and not go into it until July 21st. At that point either there will be a good brood pattern, or there will be no queen.
On a completely different note. When I opened the lower brood box I found this supersedure cell which as you can see is clearly damaged by separating the frames so I could have completely screwed everything up.
And, since I had walk these frames over to the sunlight to get a good photograph, who knows if the queen could have fallen off. Feeling pretty stupid.
