A little more than a week after installing the queen, I opened the hive to ensure she had been released. She had. All had calmed from the prior week’s mayhem and the bees were peacefully about their bees-ness within the hive. But the peace had come at quite a cost. All of the honey that had been stored for the winter was gone. I was thankful to have harvested in May because I think that, had it still been on the hive, it would have been taken as well. All that remained were a few frames containing some pollen stores. I don’t know if this is normal for a year when we received less than half our usual rainfall. On my most recent beekeepers’ meeting people were already talking about feeding, but others have mentioned that my area is still having something of a nectar flow. So it seems like this occurrence was unusual and likely linked to whatever it was I had witnessed, whether that was robbing, or an attempted takeover, or something else.

With all the honey resources gone, I need to supply them food again to ensure they can feed themselves and the new bees needed to rebuild the colony’s strength. I had placed a feeder on the top when I locked them in since they were already low on honey at that point; most of the damage had already been done. When I checked the feeding station, I was shocked to find an unmarked queen wandering on the board. How had this happened? I don’t know for certain, but I may have missed this one when searching, she may have recently hatched from an unseen queen cell, or she had recently returned from a mating flight. Clearly, my inspection technique needs improvement and I really need to be able to see eggs, since that is the hallmark of a queen-right colony; I’ve been skating by on seeing young larvae and it is not sufficient. Marc recently purchased me a magnifying glass, which should help with the eggs immensely. The rest, I hope, will come with practice…and probably more mistakes like those I’ve made over the past two months.

But what does that mean to find this wandering queen? Primarily, that my bees had not been queenless when I installed the new queen, which may have been the reason for all the turmoil. She may still have been in her cell growing with the few remaining bees caring for her, and the bees would have been reluctant to accept the new brood and bees I introduced from Andrea’s colony. It was odd to find her in the upper chamber because I had used a queen excluder so I wondered if she had hatched and then been trapped above, possibly leaving her a barren queen if she had not been able to conduct her nuptial flight, which is the one time she mates and collects all the sperm she will use for her lifetime of egg-laying. I caught her and a few others in my queen clip, which Andrea kindly bought for us after our last misadventure in trying to catch a queen.

Once I observed bees flocking to her without intending her harm, I decided to leave her in the upper box to see what she would do. Everyone was peaceful inside so it seemed she had been accepted along with the White Queen. However, she apparently had other ideas. When I returned with the refilled feeder, she calmly walked to the upper entrance and flew away. So far, never to be seen again.

I added a pollen patty a few days later and used my new magnifying glass to verify there are eggs. I also removed the empty honey super after finding wax moth larvae in it, a sign that there is too much space for the bees to defend from invaders. At this point, my plan is to stay out of the colony except for adding pollen patties and sugar syrup or fondant as needed. There really isn’t much I can do for them except keeping them fed and avoiding disrupting their brood nest. I’ll inspect it again in mid-August when I do another mite check for Mite-A-Thon.