A few weeks ago I saw proof the Purple and White hive re-queened themselves, but when I took supers off to harvest, found two frames with brood in them.

Not a big deal, kind of a relief actually to see the new queen was laying brood. However I feared that I had just blown the new queen right off of a super frame with my bee blower before realizing there was brood there.

That would be something wouldn't it? To have finally gotten a new queen, matted, returned and laying and then blow her right off a frame trying to harvest it? Ha!

My purpose for inspecting this hive today was two fold: check for new eggs (queen was still there) and to see if they had stores with the drought we've been in for the last two months.



In the picture above a lot of the brood from a few weeks ago hatched and has been back-filled with new larva. During the next inspection I'm going to place this super above the inner cover (since I don't have a queen excluder) and see if I can prevent the queen from going back up there.

The next 8 deep brood frames I pulled were filled, every cell, with eggs. This new queen is doing great! She's getting set up for a very large population to head into winter with.



I found the queen, she's very long and golden. I didn't have my marking pen on me so I didn't get to mark her. Maybe I'll see her again during the next inspection and get her marked.



They've got enough stores and don't need to be fed right now.

I gave them a healthy dose of powder sugar to help combat varroa, and closed them back up.