Hello All,
I am a beginning hobbyist beekeeper.  This is my second summer.  I have two
hives that managed to produce some honey last year and survive the winter.
With my small success I doubled my operation and now have four hives.
 
One of the hives in my back yard had been doing very well until about four
weeks ago.  I use deeps for the brood and had two full brood supers with a
very nice brood pattern.  I put on two shallow honey supers with drawn comb.
Two weeks later (two weeks ago) I checked the hive and didn't see anything
going on with the honey supers.  I checked the top brood super and did not
find any eggs or grubs only capped brood.  I also noticed the empty cells were
being filled with nectar.  This was the situation in both boxes.
Additionally, I found approximately eight queen cells in different parts of
the hive.  Some of the queen cells were in the middle of the frames looking
like pictures and illustrations I have seen of succession cells.  Then I found
cells on the bottom of some frames looking like swarm cells.  No queen to be
found (but I rarely find the queen anyway).  All queen cells were capped.  I
put a frame from a different hive in with capped brood, open brood and eggs
and closed it up.  Two weeks later, which was this past Sunday, I checked
again.  Still no eggs, seems like lots of drones and the only capped brood was
on the frame I added two weeks before.  I added another frame with eggs, open
brood and capped brood.  My question is if there is a virgin queen or a
recently mated queen will the bees make a queen from the eggs I gave them?  In
addition, any speculation on what is going on would help.  I don't know what
happened to the old queen, she seemed to be doing so well.  There is always a
possibility I accidentally killed her, as I am still rather clumsy handling my
bees.
 
Thanks
Vickie
Green Harbor, MA