Katie and I geared up in our bee suits and inspected our bees today–it was really cool.

Here are the notes from my bee journal (every beekeeper has to have one, you know):

• Bees drank 2 gallons of sugar syrup in the last week!
• Bees quit building burr comb all over the place like last time and have built straight up and down the frames.
• Bees have drawn comb on 6 of the 8 frames, leaving 1 undrawn, and 1 partially drawn (on the outsides)
• We saw bee larva in the comb, so our queen is laying eggs!
• We also saw “capped brood”, meaning larva that have been capped over so they can metamorphose
• We probably have 4 frames that were mostly capped brood–that’s a lot of bees getting ready to emerge
• Bees are storing lots of pollen in the comb
• We saw Queen Ambrose with her distinctive green dot!
• We added another super (or hive box) with frames in it for the bees to expand
• But, dum dum dum, we saw what looked like it could be a queen supersedure cell

We couldn’t tell whether it was a queen cell or just a drone cell because we are not experienced beekeepers.

If it is a queen cell, it means the bees might be preparing to replace the queen, which could be good or bad–it means we would lose our “known genetic stock” queen from B. Weaver apiaries and get “unknown genetic stock” queen, possibly from riff-raff feral hives, or from awesome super-survivor-all-on-their-own feral hives, you just don’t know.