We checked on four of the five hives in a little whirlwind yesterday. Most of them are super busy which is great news. The one slow one in the original location is still slow, but seems much healthier than before -- there is a lot of brood ready to hatch, and the queen is laying nicely. They probably just need a bit more time.
The first hive by Dolores Park though was very interesting. Last time I checked them a few weeks ago, they had filled the top hive body with brood and honey, so I put on a queen excluder and added a honey super. The super even has its own entrance which is supposed to encourage the bees to bring in more nectar since they don't have to travel through the excluder to get to the super.
When we opened the hive, there were no bees in the super -- they hadn't touched the frames, not even to build any wax. But Deno sharply spotted the queen wandering around on top of the excluder! When we examined the frames in the upper hive body, we found it filled to the brim, and we counted eight hatched queen cells, but no new queen cells.
Our best guess is that perhaps the hive swarmed and the new queen took her mating flight, but returned to the wrong hive entrance and went into the honey super entrance instead of the main entrance.
We made sure the queen was moved down into the top hive body, and reversed the hive bodies to put the relatively more open hive body on top. Replaced the queen excluder and are now hoping that the queen starts laying.
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