I took a look at the Blue/Purple hive over the weekend and was looking for eggs or larva.

I know this hive produced a new queen, and she appeared to have killed the other queen cells, but I wanted proof she was still alive, and mated, and laying.

When I looked last week, they were back-filling the brood boxes with a lot of capped honey, and they were angry. I was worried that something happened to their new queen, and they were using the brood area to store honey.

When I looked today, they were much calmer and were busy cleaning out those back-filled brood frames. There's a LOT of it to move, and it's slow going, however, I could see several frames were being opened and cleaned out, hopefully making room for brood again.

Sorry for the crooked photo below, I wasn't watching how I was holding the camera - If you tilt your head to the left and squint a bit, it looks better!


I could also see on two frames, there were eggs in the cells. Maybe 20 cells on each frame had eggs? Not many, but they were there.

I looked really, really close to see if I could verify there were only 1 egg per cell. More than one egg per cell means laying workers. I DO NOT want laying workers like I had a hive develop last year.



I strained my eyes to see clearly, and then used a ultra-bright LED flashlight to assist with the shadows in the cells. It was early afternoon with plenty of sunshine, but still too many shadows to see clearly to the bottoms of the cells.

Do you know what I found out? Bees do not like ultra-bright LED lights shined at them, and they charged the flash-light with great might.

I received only one or two stings to the glove, but was able to confirm each cell only had 1 egg. I marked the top of the frames, and in a few days time, I'll go back to these particular frames and see if the eggs are then larva.

I peeked at their supers- and they've got about 99% of the top most super capped. The others are coming along nicely too!


I'm thinking about an early spring honey extraction party?