Well that didn't take long.

The white Phoenix hive was a split from the blue/purple hive two weeks ago.

We took the old queen from the Blue/Purple hive to simulate an artificial swarm. We had found many queen cells in the Blue/Purple hive and wanted to see if removing their queen (and making increase at the same time) relieved their swarm impulse.

We know the old queen was in the hive because we saw her when we closed it up.

Could she have died? Could she have left the hive for some reason?



I don't know why she isn't there, but she definitely isn't there. No new eggs, and queen cells present.

The bees had made a couple of emergency queen cells from the brood and eggs I moved into the split with the queen.



The queen cells are small, but fully capped. I don't know if they will produce a viable replacement queen or not. I'm kind of sad the old queen is gone, she was such a strong egg layer!