So 3 or so weeks ago I decided I was going to force a hive to make a queen by pulling their current queen out and letting them do what they do best. My plan was to put the queen in a nuc with a couple of frames of brood and nurse bees and start another hive. Well as luck would have it, that queen died due to my own stupidity(note, lemongrass oil is not something they should ever come into contact with in its pure form) so I had to go buy another queen for the nuc. Well today I checked on the old hive and found some signs of some workers laying eggs though not a lot and just about the time I was going to give up on the last frame, I saw a reddish body move from one side of the frame to the other along the bottom. *** Realizing what I saw I looked on the other side and there she was. It doesn’t look like she’s taken her mating flight yet(that should be any day now if so) because she’s still kinda skinny, and she’s definitely not started laying eggs but she was there doing whatever it is that new queens do. Looks like the hive will be mite free(changing queens like this breaks the mite cycle) so I should go into fall/winter with another healthy hive.
***New queens are often “shy” and will move to hide themselves from you for one reason or another
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