Two new key dates: August 16th and September 16th

Eggs were put into this hive on July 30th. If the hive attends to those eggs, drawing out queen cells, capping them and the hive is successful in maintaining them, a new queen should emerge on Day 16 which us August 14th.
It will take her a couple of days to get oriented then a few more days to take her mating flight.
If the weather cooperates, then it's 24 days or nearly a whole month from the time she emerges until the first bees that she lays emerge.
By the middle of September the newbies should be here. I'm calculating about 45 days from egg (potrntial queen) to new eggs.
I've been feeding them a little bit stronger than a 1:1  solution.
To be honest, I don't want to go into the hive until after the 14th of August. That will be next weekend. It's just as well as this is been a relatively rainy weekend.

First you don't succeed . . .

I waited until July 22th to check and see the progress of this Hive. It was clear that nothing good was going on. I was happy to see that there were no laying workers but there was also no brood and there was the very beginning of a larvae out burst of small hive beetles. The bee population was enough to keep things under control but I needed to do something, and I needed to do it right away.
I beekeeping friends if they might have two frames of brood and eggs to give me, sell me or trade me. My good friend Michelle came through on Monday July 30th with 3 frames.
They contained quite a few eggs as well as brood in all stages and lots of nurse bees. We did a full inspection and removed the bad frames leaving them in the field so that they could be robbed out. I took one frame for freezing to feed back to the bees later and put on sugar water for food to encourage the bees.
Although the bees look small, and the population was reduced  it was sufficient to take care of this brood box until they create a queen.
I will check this again on the weekend to make sure they've started drawing out the egg comb in into queen cells.
If they haven't, and I can't find a mated queen, this hive may be lost. If they have, there may be sufficient time left in the season for the queen they create to be mated and to keep the hive going through fall and winter.
If that's the case, and the queen lays a good pattern, I will keep her, otherwise I'll requeen in the spring.
We also put in beetle blasters with three drops each of the recommended poison so that the small hive beetles don't get out of control. I checked the other day and had already started seeing it work.
Now again it's just a matter of time.

Queen present?

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.

Oh queen, oh my queen, where are you?

The current configuration is  two deep brood boxes and one medium honey super.

When I installed the new queen in the push-in cage, I made sure that there was a queen excluder between each level. I reduce the number of frames to 9.

I came out today Friday, June 30th to see if she was in the cage or had been released. The other bees had chewed the wax under the cage and released her. At this point there should have been no sign of drone brood or of laying workers in any of the three boxes, and there wasn't.

I took the honey super off, which felt a little bit lighter, that's probably because of the hellacious amount of rain that we've had. I made sure there was no one laying in the honey super.

I took the middle box, the top deep brood box and went through it starting in the middle. On the second frame I found some queen cells. One was capped. So that means the queen that was in there had to have laid these. I closed that part up and went to the bottom box below the second Queen excluder to make sure there were no laying workers. I did not find any sign.

Overall, the temperament of the hive is quiet, not aggressive which leads me to believe that they feel queen right. I did not see evidence of small hive beetles, even in the screen tray below the screen bottom board which I have filled with agricultural lime.

My decision, since one of the queen cells was already capped, is to leave this Hive alone for another week. I will check this the weekend of July 8th and see what the status is.

Since it takes  11 days at least for a queen to emerge,  one of the cells should be open. I'll look and see if there are others.  If the rain  slacks off, one of them should get made it , even if she is a weak queen, that may save this Hive which still has a good number of workers.

I'm thinking that the cell won't open for another 4-6 days. After that time it is anywhere from 8 days to 14 days until she is able to begin laying. Once she begins laying, it will be another 24 days until the first bees emerge so let's do the calculation.

If the queen cell was laid on June 27th, five days after the new Queen was installed, she should have emerged on day 16 about the 13th of July. Add two weeks for her to become mature and mated, that puts it August 1st. And then somewhere around August 24th or the end of August, the newbies will emerge.

Either this Hive will make it or not. I may ask a friend for queen cells and split these hives up -- it's a long time to go queenless. And now it will be nearly two months until the population is on the rise again. Hard year this year.

New queen - installed 6/22/17

After 2 week break, I return to the hive and found that there was no brood, no eggs no nothing. I contacted The Beekeeper who gave me the first queen and on Thursday June 22nd I installed a summer Queen trapped in a push in cage on a frame of capped and open brood and eggs. That should help with the transition and in five to seven days I will take that cage off. I want to be sure that there is no Virgin Queen running around in the hive, or that there are no laying workers. When I check. I will double check to be sure that they're not still biting at the queen in the cage.

Newspaper merge, the WTF??!!

So, yesterday I was prepared to merge my laying worker hive with my strong hive using a layer of newspaper between the two. My plan was to then take the two honey supers and rob and merge to one with sufficient f ood for the upper box till they ate their way to meeging. 

All went well. Both colonies were quiet even tho' I did not smoke them heavily. I moved the new double decker over to straddle the old location then turned my attention to the honey supers.

I culled, sorted bushes off bees from all 5he frames. Then, putting in a mixture of blanks *with no drawn wax) and about 5 frames with nectar. 

During the culling I discovered this frame. Uneven wax, drone sized cells, larvae, two tiny queen cells in development. Look inside. Multiple eggs. Do I have laying workers in the super of the strong hive? WTF!

My two concerns: Is there a queen successfully laying in the main brood box? Perhaps, i mixed up the source of the frames. Second concern is the extreme heat. It's been in the 90s. I'm venting the top cover, let's hope it's enough.

No queen! Laying worker(s)

Just got back from taking the entire east hive apart. There is no queen. There was some drone larvae and so I broke the whole thing apart walked it across the field and only let bees that could fly go back into the hive.
Hopefully, whatever laying worker(s) had deposited those drones are gone. There were no queen cells. Nothing. Nada.
If I put in a new queen, and the laying workers are still there, they will kill her.
I'm thinking I'll merge this hive with my strong hive thru newspaper. Then, if the hive continues strong I'll split after the flow is over and I've extracted on the 4th of July.