Finally Saw the Elusive Queen...

For the past few weeks, I've been seeing in the Grey Nuc evidence of a good queen - lots of eggs and larvae and brood. But I've never been able to see her. In a 5-frame nuc it shouldn't be so hard!

Well this weekend I didn't have time to do a long inspection, so I decided I'd just try to find that queen. It took me looking at each frame TWICE, but I finally found her, and was able to grab her and mark her with her own yellow dot. Here's a picture - see if you can see her (she is a little obscured by some other bees, but you can barely see her yellow dot - look for the bees grouping around the queen):

Here's a zoom in of that picture:

She's a real nice dark queen, probably descended from one of George's Carniolan queens.

So now all of the nucs have marked queens, except for the White Nuc which just received some frames last week. I gave that nuc a quick check, and didn't see any capped queen cells any more - hopefully there's a new virgin queen there. The bees were very jumpy and jittery, which means no queen.

The Green Hive is still working on a couple of supers for me, and I decided to add another super just in case the bees need more room to store honey (hint hint!). That hive still has tons of bees - this is what I found when I lifted up the outer cover:

Lots of bees, and I didn't even open up the hive proper yet!