New Queen Already?!?

Newspaper Nearly Gone

Happy to see a week later that the newspaper is nearly gone and the two hives have happily blended into one now. You can see the bees are doing a fine job of capping the cells in this upper box. I gave the frames a quick inspection for eggs and found none. The cells are nearly all filled with nectar so there's no room for brood.

I removed the top box in order to check on the progress of the queen in the two lower deeps and you can image my surprise when I spotted the unmarked queen pictured below! I inspected every inch of the hive and found no trace of the original queen. I did find two used swarm cells (there's one in the lower left of the photo and you can see the cap of another in the upper right.)

Used Swarm Cells

There's way too many bees in the hive for it to have swarmed, so I wonder:

Did the old queen leave with a small amount of bees that a swarm is unnoticeable?

Did I thwart an oncoming swarm by placing the third box on the hive? And if so, did the new, stronger Queen kill the old one?

New Queen!

What ever happened, this new Queen is doing very well - there's beautiful brood pattern and lots of eggs in the frames.

Nice Brood Pattern

I read a few years back that beekeepers are starting to talk that there's something about the Queens coming from North Carolina - that the bees are superseding them sooner than they would normally. I can't speak for the quality of all North Carolina Queens but this is the third year in a row that I didn't have a new queen make it past July. Maybe there's something about our climate in Maryland that the Queens can't adapt to, or the journey here turns out to be too much of a stress on the Queens... What ever it is, the bees know when a Queen is not performing and will take action to ensure the health and strength of the hive. I don't mind the loss of my North Carolina Queens as long as it didn't mean the demise of both my hives.