8 March, 2009 - 1:pm

The weather was about 75º, with a slight breeze.

Gene and went out to where I keep my bees to inspect them. We opened up the Alpha hive. We thought it would be a good idea to check each frame for brood and such. We went through all the frames in the top brood box and did not find any brood( no eggs, larva or capped brood). That seemed very odd. But the bees were storing pollen and nectar, because the frames that should have had brood contained only food.

We then decided to look into the bottom brood box. We examined all of the frames and found only pollen and uncapped honey. No signs( no eggs, larva or capped brood) of the queen were evident. But there were so many bees, busily bringing in pollen and nectar filling up cells.

So sometime in late January, early February I must have injured or killed the queen.

Gene and I were discussing what to do about this situation. So I called our Bee Associations President for some help and information. I explained to him what we found and he confirmed what we guessed, no queen.

I will be ordering a queen for the Alpha hive early next week.


The hive inspection for the Beta hive was very short. Opened the hive and moved a couple of frames to look for queen activity.

Found larva and capped brood. Buttoned it back up and left the Bee yard a little sad.

The feeder jars for both hives were just above half full, I left them in place.