A Tale of Two Hives

It's about two weeks since making the split and getting a new queen, and it appears I have trouble.  The new queen appears to have been the subject of some kind of coup - there is no sign of her at all!  There are tons of bees in the hive, but there is NO new brood, and the one or two remaining capped cells are now hatching!  So, it appears she was killed, or she left. You may remember that I did see her just about a week ago, when she was being mobbed.

So what to do?  After a call to Eugene and to Bob Graham, the course of action was decided as this. Take a frame of eggs from the parent hive - which is doing really well - and move this into the daughter hive.  The idea is to see if there is a queen and I just missed her.  If she is present then she will raise the eggs and the cells will get capped off.  If she isn't present then hive will get the urge to create queen cells from the eggs and I should be able to see these cells in a few days. I suspect there is no queen as there are no signs of any eggs or larvae, and there should be two weeks after she was installed.

So I went into the Parent hive. Not much is going on in the supers, but there is tons and tons of brood (capped) in the main hive bodies. I couldn't find any large number of eggs to start with, then I found the queen on a new frame, with lots of new eggs.  I moved her off as gently as I could and transferred the eggs into the daughter hive, in exchange for a frame of honey and some pollen.

We will see what happens next...