Remember last week when I made a last ditch effort to stop a swarm from happening by making a nuc with the old queen, and leaving only 2 queen cells in place to simulate an artificial swarm?

I peeked on them today just to make sure the cells we saw last week were capped and all...and the cells were being torn down. Instead, the bees used a couple of eggs from a super frame the queen laid right before I took her out, and made them into a trio of queen cells.



I looked through the rest of the hive and saw a few emergency queen cells, they were small and kind of dinky looking.

These three queen cells above all looked good, about the same age, all three capped and right next to each other.

I figured if the girls didn't like the two I chose to leave them last time, and they felt obligated to show me who's boss by tearing them down and building three new ones, then fine. I'll leave them alone and they can have their go at it.

I'm sure they know what's best anyways...

In about 8 days we should be able to see one of these three cell caps neatly bitten off and the other two punched out and terminated by the surviving queen.

In other news, I opened the tall Blue/Purple hive, and checked on their supers. The first super is completely full and capped. The second super is about half drawn. Below you can see one of the frames I pulled.

The color of the honey they're storing is very dark orange. Completely opposite of the extremely light spring honey from earlier this year.



The photos don't do it justice, because in person the honey looked a beautiful burnt orange color.