The burr comb, last shown April 30
Recall my June 5th post about Svetlana and the double-decker hive? Well, I think the plot has thickened. The lower level does indeed have a queen; I saw her yesterday, and she's laying quite nicely. Unfortunately, the Minnesota Hygenic queen I gave to Claire isn't doing so well. ...I forgot to mention before that when I was catching that queen, she slipped away at one point and flew a few victory laps around the hive before settling on a leaf. I was confused at the time, having heard that laying queens don't fly. But I thought no more about it, except as an amusing anecdote.
But yesterday, as I was responding to another beek's post about a double-decker hive, something clicked. I must have caught a virgin daughter, and left Freyja (the MH queen) in my hive. Oops. Fortunately mother and daughter were getting along, and one hadn't killed the other. But this could also mean that Freyja isn't doing so well, as I've heard tell about mother-daughter hives. This theory is supported by the presence of fresh supercedure cells (see photo above and detail below). Good grief - Freyja isn't even a year old! So much for better mating quality of bought queens.
The peanut-looking thing is a queen cell. There are also fat larvae nearly ready to be capped, and the high-domed caps over drone pupae. There's a tiny rice-grain egg above and to the right of the queen cell. The glisteny stuff in the dark cells is nectar.
The wee swarm nuc (briefly mentioned on May 31st) is still wee. There was a small patch of eggs a week ago, and a small patch again this week. But no larvae. Hmmm. I think this girl is a dud. I'm going to give her another week before staging a coup and combining her girls with Ivanova's.
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