I'm an amateur beekeeper and a reforming worrywort, which is a bad combination.  As Mark posted yesterday, our hive check showed no eggs or larvae on Tuesday.  In addition, as you can see to the left, a lot of the capped brood is drones, which could mean our queen didn't get properly fertilized during her mating flight.  (Drones --- male bees --- come from unfertilized eggs.  You can tell drones at the pupal stage because they're bigger, so the cells are capped with a dome raised above the surface of the comb.)

We also found two queen cups, which means the hive is probably not happy with the queen and is trying to replace her.  At first, I was worried sick, but now I'm a bit intrigued.  Challenges are what make life interesting!

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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