Queen Trouble

After a couple weeks had passed, my inspection showed that Meg had immediately drawn out and started laying in a number of frames, but while Jo was drawing comb almost as fast, there were only a couple cells with eggs, eggs on the sides of cells and multiple eggs in some cells. There were also a number of queen cups on some of the frames suggesting that the bees were trying to raise a new queen.

With no improvement the next week, I purchased another Minnesota Hygenic queen and added her to the hive. She's been laying wherever she can, although without a good brood pattern to start with, she's been rather limited in the amount of drawn comb available to her. It's starting to open up a bit as new comb is drawn out, but it will be a few weeks before her brood really starts emerging and the hive population takes off.

In the meantime, many of the frames are deformed from the queen cells, and some of the cells have been enlarged to accommodate the larger drones. It looks to me like there is enough consistent capped worker brood that the hive has only been set back a few weeks and it should take off mid-June, but I'm not expecting any excess honey from this one. I've been considering adding a frame or two of capped brood from Meg, but I'll probably learn more by watching how this turns out than by making any more manipulations. I did move a frame of undrawn foundation to the middle of the drawn frames to try to alleviate the honeybound state. They're almost done drawing out this comb, and in two weeks, I should be able to use this frame to judge the queen's laying pattern.

Meg is 60% finished drawing out a second medium box, and there are eggs and curing honey in both boxes. I'll probably be adding another box next weekend as long as the bees continue drawing out comb in the next week's warm and wet weather.

One other thing I noticed is that Meg is taking almost a gallon of syrup a week, where Jo wasn't touching their syrup. Jo also stopped drawing out comb as fast, and I suspect the lack of thousands of new bees every day as well as a few weeks without a queen has slowed them down more than I'd hoped. I removed the second hive body I'd added to Jo to put the feeder directly above the main cluster. I hope this helps them to take as much syrup as possible to stimulate more wax production so we can open up some more space for brood and further stores.