Hi Jesse:

>I am fairly certain that I saw the queen. I got a really good look at her.

My theory is that you have a really good queen that’s ready to get busy,
and the workers themselves aren’t yet up to speed. My hives now and then
have some cells with multiple eggs early on in the season, and all the eggs
are *on the cell bottom* as they should be if laid by a good healthy queen.
If you saw your queen and now are seeing eggs, I think you are ok and
wouldn’t fret just yet. If you saw a queen and she is now dead, you
probably wouldn’t see laying workers showing up immediately. According to
the bee books, it usually takes a couple of weeks at least for workers to
begin laying. A few years back I had a nuc that became queenless, so I
decided to wait and see just what would happen. It was almost three weeks
before the workers laid eggs. The laying workers in the nuc didn’t just lay
multiple eggs *on the side of the cells*, but deposited some of them on the
face of the comb, too.

Regards,
Dick Allen

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