I checked on Hive #4 today to see if a queen had hatched. I found the queen cell on frame #3 had hatched. I also found another frame with a queen cell that had a hole chewed in it. On frame #6, I found two more queen cells that were still capped. This means the newly hatched queen has not killed the other queen cells.
Since I need to re-queen hive #1, I decided to make 5 frame Nuc hive with the frame that still has queen cells on it with bees from the #1 hive. Once I opened the #1 hive I also found queen cells. This means one of two things.
1 - Either the hive is too crowded and they plan to swarm.
OR
2 - The original queen is now failing and they are trying to replace her.
I don’t want them to swarm but do plan to re-queen as soon as I can get the bees to develop a queen and she is well mated. To prepare for this I took the frames from hive #1 with the queen cells and put it in the nuc as well.
I am feeding the Nuc with a front entrance feeder.
I will check on the hives maybe on Saturday June 9th to see if the Nuc queen has hatched. If so I will leave them alone until they are laying eggs in a good pattern.
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