We can’t stress enough that hive inspections should be about looking for evidence of a queen, not about finding the queen. Look for eggs, larvae, and brood. What do you do if you find a supersedure cell? These are typically on the frame in the main brood area. As a general rule we leave them to let the colony raise a new queen. They may see something in the queen that we don’t, they may just not like her, for whatever reason they are going to replace her, let them. We just know that in about 3 weeks we’ll want to make sure the new queen made it back from mating (again just looking for eggs, larvae, and brood) and that things are ok. Colonies probably replace queens more often than people realize, and most of the time they just take care of things on their own just fine.
I am super new and am really wanting to be successful. I attended your bee class last month. When checking my hive today I am not confident there were eggs, larva, etc. I also wasn’t able to find a queen. Should I worry??
We can’t stress enough that you don’t need to find your queen but should look for evidence of the queen. There should be larvae and eggs in different stages at this point, and capped brood. If you’re not confident in what you are seeing you’re welcome to text or email pictures to us and we can see if we see a problem. Are the bees bringing in pollen? That is usually a good indicator that they have brood to feed. Are they taking sugar water and making up wax in the hive? are they capping honey or are they just maintaining?