Today I went out to expand my main hive and I got the bright idea that I should just take some of the frames from my former main hive since it didn’t have any use at the moment. Soo, while moving the frames into the new hive body I kept noticing that there were several bees, maybe 200, hanging out on a couple of frames, bees that I had previously thought were robbers from my main hive. Then I saw her. The queen was still there. Apparently a lot of the workers just died off(probably from starvation because they never touched the syrup I gave them) and she was left with a real skeleton crew. To boost her numbers I took a frame of brood and nurse bees from the main hive so she can get back up and running. They’re all in a nuc right now but will probably have their numbers up enough for a full hive by the first week or so of April. Once she’s produced enough brood I’m going to be sure to mark her since that’s the easiest way to find the queen, and you can still lose them even when they’re marked since they tend to be shy, something I thought was a joke until I watched one repeatedly run from whatever side of the frame I happened to be looking at.
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