I immediately closed off the entrances and removed the food.  I went ahead and did an inspection of both nucs. In the purple nuc, which had contained the first emerged descendent of George, I found no sign of the queen and a very small capped queen cell:

You can see that the queen cell is barely longer than the bee tending it.

In the orange nuc, more sad news.  This is the queen cell that I entirely removed the protector from.  I thought it looked like the bees were accepting the cell well.  So proof positive that bee behavior remains a mystery to me:

I apologize for the quality of the photography at this point.  The large dark area on the cell is the perfect circle the bees had chewed out to reveal the immature larva within.  The larva did not seem as developed as I would have expected.  I wonder if this was a cell that maybe didn’t receive enough royal jelly and was not going to fully develop after all.

Instead, the bees are working on this:

This appears as conjoined queen cells.  The one on the left is capped and (if you use your imagination) you can see the larva in the top of the one on the right.  (I could actually see the larva but the photography lacks!)

The plan at this point is to move the nucs (and queen castle) to the outyard.  This should relieve the pressure from the larger colonies next door and keep the bees from my prying eyes for a bit.  (I’m sure they’ll appreciate that!)

Lessons I’m learning here:

1.  I need to set up stronger nucs, particularly during nectar dearth, so they can be more resilient and able to fend for themselves.

2.  It may actually be a wise idea to double up on the queen cells in the mating nucs.  Just because the cell is capped, it does not necessarily follow that the larva will develop without incident.

The package I bought had a Georgian queen I’ll call Georgia and was installed into hive 2. Georgia swarmed, was caught, and has made her way into hive 5 as back-up. Hive 2, therefore, made a new daughter queen, Georgia 2. This hive is doing well, but I might still want to requeen before winter. Hive 4 was the swarm, but after swapping queens, now has another Sally 2c.

Hive 1: Sally 2a
Hive 2: Georgia 2a
Hive 3: Sally 2b
Hive 4: Sally 2c
Hive 5: Georgia (backup queen currently in a cardboard NUC box)

[See image gallery at www.littleluceyfarm.com]

This weekend, we also set up the NUCs for Q3. There were grafted last Sunday (one week ago), and will likely emerge this Wed or Thu. Today we harvested the queen cells (from George and Lisa). I ended up with two George 2 queens. I set up the NUCs next to each other, but did not completely block the entrance to the empty NUC. It was being robbed  badly by this evening when I went to install the George 2 cells. I decided to move the NUC being robbed about 80 feet away (back to the original location) in hopes that the robbers would just stay or relocate, but not continue to rob. I also installed the frame of brood from Mel with some bees into this NUC. I hope the two groups of bees can get along. I now have Hives 6 and 7 raising the new George queens.

Hive 6: George 2a
Hive 7: George 2b (in Area 2)

Kristien.