Please Don’t Swarm!

For some reason my bees are crowded and it looks like they are beginning to think about swarming! They never built up the last three frames in the bottom box and only want to work in the center of the top box. So today, I opened them up and did a bit of shuffling of frames in the hopes that they will spread out a bit and work on filling up the remaining empty frames.

opening up the box

that’s a LOT of bees!

swapping empty frames for full frames

My queen is quite prolific! Look at all the brood she’s making…

   Are these bunnies or bees? LOL

You can even see the little white larvae in this one. Unfortunately, I think you can also see a queen cell in this one… :o(

I also scraped off a bit of burr comb before shutting it all back up…

Upon further examination, I am pretty sure that there was a queen cell on the burr comb.

   I did a bit of research and sure enough, that looks like a queen cell. Why do they make queen cells? Because they are getting ready to swarm and take the queen and 60% of the colony with her and leave. The queen cells are her baby replacements.

I need to do whatever I can to keep that from happening! So on Wednesday, I’m going back in to hopefully find all the queen cells and get rid of them.

It still may not guarantee they won’t swarm, but here’s hoping and praying that they will stay put!