We have a Queen! After we lost our queen 4 weeks ago we left our bees alone to finish their emergency queen rearing. It sure was hard to leave them undisturbed for 4 weeks, but so very necessary. Today we peeked inside and immediately spotted eggs and larvae that are a few days old. Success! This means a queen has hatched, mated, and started laying. Hopefully this colony will develop the strength it had last year as we move into the fall. The split we created off this colony 4 weeks ago petered out to about 20 bees just flying around. All the honey on that hive is gone; they've probably been robbed dry. We recombined the remaining bees into the parent hive with a sheet of newspaper between them to ease their re-assimilation.
