I went in to the hives today to see if they needed any additional supers. All the sugar water I had left for the newest hive (the one on the right) was gone and there were no dead bees sitting in the top feeder. None of the other hives needed any new supers.
The oldest hive (the one on the left) had not progressed at all in terms of the bees storing more honey. We left it as it was, but then I thought about it and came back later. It was my experience last year that a premature swarm can sometimes be just that; premature. Last year, when I had just installed a hive, within a week or two it swarmed. I gathered the swarm into a new hive. I turned out that the old hive had no queen. In the end, neither colony was strong enough to defend itself from wax moths. As I thought about this, I realized that I may have the same situation this time around as well. So, I went back into the hive a little later. I'm afraid I may have the same situation this year. I pulled out every frame from the brood box of the original hive and found no evidence of a queen laying eggs whatsoever. I saw no evidence of the bees making a new queen either. And, by the end of my observations, I found that I had a very angry hive; another sign that the hive is queenless.
I need to go back in and combine the three boxes with the other two active hives. I have evidence from the middle hive that there is a good queen because there were capped brood cells all over the place. I trust the other hive also has a queen because they clustered around her when I caught the swarm.
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