Curiosity Found the Queen

Day 7     I arrived at the hive around 7:30 p.m. with a pitcher of sugar water to re-fill the feeders. The back and middle jars were empty and the front one had about a 1/4 of an inch left. In seven days, they have eaten 96 ounces of sugar water. After filling them and setting them back in place, I placed my ear down close to the bars above where the cluster had been for the past few days. I didn't hear too much going on. There also wasn't as much activity going on outside the hive either. I began to wonder if everything was alright in there. Should I open it up again? I was just in there in the day before and I didn't want to bother them again at least until day 8 or 9.

Oh well, I had to know. Slowly I took out the two bars closest to the divider board. I could see more bees walking around in there instead of just being clustered together. I took out two more bars and I could see comb between the moving bodies! This was exciting, I now had confirmation that they were doing what they were supposed to be doing. Imagine that. The comb is visible particularly well as the white areas in the lower area of the bees. Counting from the front of the hive, this is bar 7.



Now I began to wonder about the queen. Was she still in the cage or was she free? I carefully slid the bars back until I got to the one that had the cage attached to it. Now the cage has one side that is solid and one side that has wire mesh. Of course when I put it in, the solid side was facing the rear of the hive so I couldn't see into the cage. If there is a 50/50 chance of something being right or easy, it usually doesn't work in my favor. This is what it looked like before moving the bees out of the way on the screened side. 


So I slid the cage bar back and after moving the bees out of the way I could see that she was no longer inside. However, they had built the comb all the way around the cage and I had to cut it out, leaving a gaping hole in the comb. No problem, they will fix it in a short while. This is the empty cage. You can see the white where the comb was attached on all three sides.



So the next thing I wanted to do was make sure she was still alive. I lifted the cage bar out and my wife looked on one side while I searched amongst the bees on the other, but we didn't see her. I returned that bar and pulled another out. Again we didn't see her on that comb either. I returned that one and pulled another. My wife spotted the queen on her side of the comb. The big yellow dot was all but gone, leaving only a speck but she was far larger than the workers and easy to distinguish. With my inspecting the bars, there were six bars that were 1/2 to 3/4 built comb. Bar 8 had a tiny comb just starting. Not wanting to cause any more disturbance I returned the bar and slowly worked all of the bars back into place and closed the roof.

Unfortunately, in my excitement that all was well in Bee Land, I forgot to take pictures of the queen and the cutout in the comb where the cage was.

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