Given the mini-swarm of yesterday, I decided to look in the hive today. I didn't see much change from last time, except that more brood had been born (look at the frame above - it has a lot of empty cells, indicitave of not having a laying queen). I counted 13 queen cells along the bottom edges of some of the frames (like above).But then I saw something which caught my eye - I thought I saw a queen! Look at the picture below (click for a larger image). The top part is what I think is a queen (her longer body is somewhat obscured by the worker bees. Darn those bees - they don't hold still for pictures!). The bottom very fuzzy shows the queen, you can see her solid pale color (you see why I am not a wildlife photographer?). I also heard what sounded like a high pitched beeping. I think it was the queen "piping." It's how queen communicate to other queens.
So this is very confusing to me! But good news - tomorrow I have a couple of seasoned beekeepers scheduled to come out and we'll go through my hive.
I also put on a jar of sugar syrup to feed the bees (since I took off the honey super).
Stay tuned!
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