I had fully intended to just give more syrup to the P/W hive, the one that was a split from the Blue/Purple hive, and got a new hygienic queen from the club a few weeks ago, and then close them up.

But then, my curiosity got the best of me, and I wanted to see how they were doing on drawing the frames out with all this syrup, and how much longer I could expect to provide syrup.

When I opened the cover, I noticed a few bees walking around, and some of them had a very light golden color, with very tiny eyes, almost ghost like.

 I presume she had just hatched from a capped brood cell?



Putting the cover aside, I saw the marked queen walking around on a frame of syrup, probably looking for a place to lay eggs.



I pulled a few more frames, wanting to see how their progress on wax drawing was going.

Then I looked closer, an I found two medium sized queen cells hanging from the middle of the frame, right next to each other (circled in yellow below).

I didn't get a clear shot when I zoomed in, but believe me they were there.

There was no eggs, larva or jelly in them, the bees must have been just working on them.



I scraped them off in disbelief and checked the rest of the frames. No queen cups or queen cells to be found anywhere else.

I wonder, why would they want to supersede their queen? She was new, young and obviously fertile.

The colony wasn't really large enough (only occupying 1 1/2 deep boxes) to be wanting to swarm.

I'll definitely be checking these guys during the next inspection to see if they rebuild queen cells.