Well I am ever impressed by bees. Like I mentioned, 1st pollen was about 2 weeks ago, spring showed up last week, I did trigger brood rearing in April with patties. Somehow the colony in question (suspected laying worker) has a laying queen she was just a bad egg layer (multiple eggs and off centered) that somehow got mated  in the last 2 weeks. I found the previous marked queen dead on the landing board. Luckily I didn't do too much shaking and split the LW colony over 2 queenright colonies with a screened hole. As we were getting ready to pack things up my helper noticed a group of bees clumped together at the back of my hive stand surrounding a young queen with a egg sticking out. I really don't know how she got mated and it does explain the young bees I was seeing. The older queen likely ran out of sperm and is the reason I was seeing so much drone brood and they supersedured her while she was still alive. Remember we are still getting -5C nights or colder and maybe 16C day highs.  My boomer colony with the poor queen (4 years old) has been producing a higher rate of drones since early April.

So after finding her, I re-assembled the colony no longer worried about LWs. I spilt the other booming colony into 4, 3 without queens and one with the old queen. I have 3 queens coming on Tuesday with a spare just in case!!. I will likely split her (young queen) off in a small nuc to observe her and use up my spare queen. And like that I am back up to 7 colonies if all goes well.

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