Bees update

The summer and beekeeping have caught up with me. Last week I noticed that my hive with the introduced queen had fewer frames of active bees than the week before, when I had been excited that they were making honey and that the frames were heavy. That, in retrospect was not a good sign. Turns out I could not find any brood, was seeing cleaning activity, and could not find the queen on Thursday, the 24th of June. I called my queen supplier, who asked me to check one more time that evening for the queen.

No go, I then spent the weekend worrying and missing the queen supplier because of other work, etc.

Yesterday, I got a new queen. this is hard work for the queen bee producer. He maintains smaller hives- 2 frame hives( 4 per 10 frame super) with entrances on all 4 sides of the supers. It took almost 2 hours to find a hive with a queen. We left a sea of work for him to consolidate hives. At one point he mentioned that he had not checked the hive we were looking at for the last 2 weeks. He has, I think 64 hives in one bee yard, then a bunch - maybe 10 on a small hillside. The queen we found was unmarked. He has a portable hood for collecting her- a kind of exoskeleton that fits in a net muff thing, then he marks the queen's abdomen and puts her in a queen cage for transport. This was somewhat of a panic on a 90 degree plus day. The queen candy he uses to plug the cage up was already melting, before the queen was ensconced. The instructions for introducing her went from over night in the cage- like last time, to 2-3 hours in the cage, to one hour max, and use AC on the way home. He was concerned about the powdered sugar all over the queen. He wanted the bees to get to her asap to clean her up- worrying that the candy/sugar could damage her somehow. I haven't even had time to google the issue yet.

Anyway, I got her home by 1:30, then into the hive. She was out by 2:40, and disappeared into the frames.