About a month ago, we made the rounds of our hives to see how everyone had fared through the winter. At each location, interestingly enough, we found one strong hive that was already building a strong population and one hive that was nearly dead (if not completely dead). I don't believe that either of the dead hives was caused by colony collapse -- the bees did not just disappear from either one, that I can tell. Each of them had a colony that was a bit on the small side at the end of the fall, and I just don't believe they had a critical mass of population to maintain themselves through the winter.
At any rate, rather than ordering new packages for these two hives, we decided to do a split from the healthy hives at each location. We chose 5 frames from each healthy hive that were heavy with developing brood and eggs, and swapped them out with five empty frames from the empty hives. The hope was that the while the brood on these frames was hatching to maintain the population, the bees would raise one of the eggs as a new queen.
Yesterday and today, I made the rounds again and checked both locations -- in each location the strong hives were ready for their first honey super (yeay!). In fact at the Dolores Park location, it appeared that the colony was preparing swarm cells. I am pretty confident that I was able to get them a new super in time, but they were quite ready for more space.
What I really was anxious to learn though was whether the two weak hives were able to produce a new queen and whether she was successful in mating. At Dolores Park, I examined just a few frames before I found copious amounts of eggs in the cells! Some of the cells on one frame side seemed to have some strange laying patterns, such as more than one egg in a cell, or eggs attached to the side, rather than the bottom of the cell, but they overall laying pattern was good on the rest of the frames I examined, so I imagine that the one frame was just from the queen's early attempts as she first started laying.
At the other location the weak hive seemed to have a decent sized population, all things considered. However as I started examining the frames I could not find any eggs at all; frame after frame and all I found were adult bees. I was just about to close up the hive and run home to order a queen to give the hive, when I saw this!
Voilà la Reine! She appears to be plump enough that I believe she has mated already, she must not have started laying quite yet though. We'll give this hive a little more time and check again, but I think they are going to be alright.
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