Well, I figured that the 4th of July would be a good day to dig into the “Bees Rules” hive to catch and mark the new queen from Snyder’s. Three frames into the first brood box I ran into a frame with several capped supercedure cells. I very carefully and thoroughly inspected every frame to see if the supercedure cells were just a knee jerk reaction on the part of the hive, but I could not find the queen.
Obviously, the bees did not like the new queen from Snyders!! Further in, I found three other frames with supercedure cells. At this point, I’m thinking that I need to let the bees do this on their own.
I pulled an eight frame deep that I was using for a trap and moved the frames from the “Misty” NUC into the trap (with three new frames of foundation). I took two frames of brood (with supercedure cells), 1 of resources and two frames of foundation and created a new “Misty” NUC. I left the other frames with supercedure cells in the “Bees Rules” box and filled the empty slots with foundation. I’m figuring that splitting the supercedure cells up this way will double my odds of actually getting a mated queen out of the effort.
If I only get one queen in the deal I can recombine the boxes back into the “Bees Rules” hive. If they both fail?? IDK.
Time to wait and watch…