Queen Trapped!

Today we went out to harvest the frames of honey off the Big Hive.  When we opened up the top box and removed the inner cover at first we did not quite understand what we were looking at.  The capped and partially capped frames of honey we put in there two weeks ago from the other hives were chewed open and empty.  It looked like instead of finishing off the honey and capping it, they had instead decided to eat it all.  But why?

I wanted to see what was happening in the brood boxes, even thought this colony is usually pretty aggressive,  so we popped the three very light supers off and set them aside while we looked into the brood boxes.  All we could see were capped drone cells and no worker cells at all.  The population had really dropped dramatically since the last time we were in here.  This hive was in big trouble.  It seemed like it had somehow lost the queen and it looked like there were mainly drones populating the boxes.  Signs of a laying worker.   But what happened!!!!!  There was a very good queen in there just a month before.  We looked for succession or swarm cells and found none.  The only thing to do was to get rid of the laying worker, put in a frame of eggs from another hive (if we could find one we could spare), and hope that they could raise a new queen for themselves.  

Getting rid of a laying worker is a very time consuming and disruptive process.  You can't tell which worker it is so you have to take the whole hive far away and dump all the bees out onto the ground.  The theory being that the laying worker has never left the hive in her life and will not be able find her way back to fly back in.  The field workers and drones will.  Problem solved.  And it makes the birds really happy because all of a sudden there is a huge pile of confused bees wandering around on the ground just waiting to be eaten.  

We got ready to dump the workers out to get rid of the laying worker.  That's when Charlie spotted a black queen running around in one of the honey supers we had just taken off a few minutes before.  Somehow she got trapped up there.  Probably our fault.  The poor thing had no room to lay eggs because the supers were full of capped or partially finished honey and no attendants to clean out the cells for her.  The colony probably could still smell she was in the hive so did not think to make a queen cell until it was too late.  And then a worker started laying and they just make drones...who in turn are hungry little guys.  The drones ate all the honey we had been counting on harvesting today.  

This is all an educated guess.  Not sure what actually happened, but who cares, we have a queen!  Relieved, we set her aside in a closed box so she did not fly away and then reassembled the brood boxes  after dumping all the workers and drones out across the yard.  

 A big set back but maybe this colony will bounce back.  

Beekeeping seemed easier when we first started.  The more I learn the harder it gets.