New Queen Still Not Up to Speed

One week later and the new queen is laying a bit better but not as good as I had hoped for at this point in her young life. (She's 24 days old today.)

I'm worried that there are only eight cells containing wscovered brood, very few eggs and even fewer larvae and that the queen has continued to lay just on the one side of the one frame on which she was hatched.

As you can see in the photo, she's laying a small but nice, tight pattern but there are three cells in which there are two eggs. I wondered if this was the result of workers taking matters into their own hands as this hive is aging with no new brood, so to speak, that will help it survive.

I moved over a frame full of brood in the various stages (it also had capped honey) from the OV hive. My intent is to give the hive more of a population than the queen is currently providing.

A call to Chip Whipkey, who raises queens, reminded me that the eggs of laying workers will be more to the side of the cell as in this example. Chip also explained that I didn't really need to move over brood as the bees will work things out, providing nurse bees from older bees if needed. (This also accounted for the entertaining young foragers when I first made the split.)

Chip suggests that, because there is now more brood, I need to up the nurse bee numbers in the new hive so that there are enough to keep the brood warm. To do that, Chip explained that essential oils such as Honey-B-Healthy can be used to mask the scent while I add them from the OV hive. The process is quite easy:

1. Have handy a spray bottle containing a sugar syrup / Honey-B-Healthy mixture.
2. Select a frame in the OV have that is full (both sides) of brood.
3. Spay the nurse bees on that frame with the sugar syrup / Honey-B-Healthy mixture, and then
4. Dump those bees into the new hive.

 The essential oils mask the scent and the bees won't know these new bees don't belong with them and the new nurse bees won't know the difference from the inside of one hive to another. Smart! :-)

I will do this in the morning as I think the population of the OV hive needs to be thinned out a bit. They have not yet started to draw out the comb in the honey super but the brood boxes have plenty of pollen, nectar and capped honey in two of the three boxes. I did find a blown out queen cell (pictured here) that I think the bees decided to clean out instead of allowing it to hatch, but there are also two queen cells containing larvae that are not yet closed. I did spot the queen as well as eggs, larvae, etc. so I'm not sure if these are Russian bees just being Russian bees or are truly planning to swarm. Removing some of the population should help if the tendency is towards a swarm.