March 2010, Dad and I headed back to Salt Lake City to get two more boxes of bees. Down an back in one day and out to Kelly's place to set them up. We moved the only surviving hive from last year to the middle of the row with a new hive on either side. Attached the feeder bottles and left them alone for a couple days. Every 3 or 4 days we would make sure they had sugar water in the feeder bottles. The weather this spring was very uncooperative. Cold, almost freezing clear into early June. Lots of rain and wind. Not very good for keeping bees.
Early June 2010, when checking the status of each hive we discovered that one of the new hives (north) had lost its queen. (CRAP! - $75 bucks down the drain). I give the north hive credit though, as they tried to grow a new one, but with only one queen cell and the rain, wind and cold, the odds were against them. Eventually, without a queen the hive started to do weird things. One day I saw eggs in the cells and was excited thinking that the queen came back and all was well. Later we discovered that a worker bee (all workers are female and can lay eggs) was busy laying. The thing is that a worker bee can only lay drone bees. So no workers, or queen. In addition to that she was quickly creating a mess in the hive. Sometimes laying several eggs in a cell and in no particular pattern. We realized that with a growing population of drones and a shrinking population of workers they would soon be out of food and we would lose the hive. and with no hope of re-queening, we accepted this one as a lost cause.
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