Starting to get complicated...

After a lovely Memorial Day Weekend, I decided to stop by the hive and check out the ladies' progress. It has been two weeks since I opened up the hive, and I was looking to see how many of the frames have been built out. Once 7 of the 10 frames are full, it's time to add another hive body (layer), making the hive taller.

I began removing frames and examining them. It's really neat to see the different colors of pollen in the cells. At the beginning, most of the pollen was a bright yellow/orange color. As different plants and flowers have come into bloom, some of the pollen is looking more like a blue color.

The center frames are full of capped brood (larvae) and honey. This is good, because it means the queen has been laying lots of eggs, which will keep the hive alive and working. Worker bees only live about 40 days in the midst of summer, so the queen needs to constantly be laying more eggs.

Then I stumbled upon something I was not expecting to see... two somethings actually. QUEEN CELLS. Oh no! These are very different looking than the brood cells of worker bees. They look more like a peanut hanging off the frame, instead of a smooth covered hexagon. Why are the bees building a new queen?! Is my hive going to swarm? DID THE QUEEN DIE?!

I was feeling pretty paniced, and confused, but managed to take a few pictures and emailed them to my beekeeping class instructor, Jodi. I also ran into my friend Amanda, who is a beekeeper, a few minutes later in Hannaford and picked her brain about what might be happening in the hive. She suspected that the queen may be dead or weak, and the hive was reacting by making a new queen. If there are multiple queens in the hive, they will fight until only one queen lives! Wow. Because the queen cells were in the center of the hive, not on the bottom, Amanda thought that it is unlikely that the hive is going to swarm. Swarming is when the queen takes of with half of the hive to start a new hive, leaving behind half of the workers and queen cells (for a new queen to emerge).

Jodi emailed me back with the following:

Rebecca - Yes, those are supercedure cells. There may have been something going on with your queen and the workers felt that she just wasn't pulling her weight. This is not a swarm cell. That means 1/2 of the hive will not be flying off. I'd take another look, and see if there is a queen, leave the cells and you should be fine. The queens will emerge, duke it out and you'll have a (hopefully) a stronger queen for the rest of the summer. Keep feeding, and take a look in your hive in about a week to see if she has emerged and if you have a new queen. Good luck! Jodi

For now, I will just wait to see what happens. Even though I didn't have 7 full frames yet, I did add the second hive body with 10 more frames to give them some more room to expand. This is starting to get complicated!