Went into a hive today looking for the queen.  I've been in before trying to isolate her to a box, or three.  The hive is made up of four Illinois supers.  It's a booming hive but.....  the bees are MEAN!!  I've been asked to replace the queen.   As mentioned earlier, I looked for eggs and brood.  That seemed to be down in the bottom two supers so I used some smoke to drive the second super of bees down into the first box.  I then placed a queen excluder between that box and the top three boxes.  That was last Friday.  This afternoon, three days later, I went back into the hive to look for the queen.  I examined from the top down.

I got all the way to the bottom without seeing the queen.  And....  I saw no evidence of brood.  There were no eggs nor any young brood.  I started replaceing the frames without bees back into empty boxes starting at the bottom.  I then place a queen excluder over the box and frames and started shaking bees from the rest of the hive onto the excluder, examining the top of the excluder after each box was shook out.  At no time did I see the queen.  I did find what I think was an egg in the start of a supersedure cell.  I left that.  I had two queen cages that held queens a week ago.  I had them in case I found the queens and I would have a place to put the queens I'm replacing.  When I placed an empty cage next to where the bees were, the bees almost immediately started exploring the cages extensively.  I need some help here.  Do you think the former queen is gone?  Should I go ahead and try to install my new queen in the top super that has
 been separated from the rest of the colony with the queen excluder?  I don't see evidence of eggs or young brood anywhere except for that one 'possible' egg in the supersedure cell.  

HELP!!!!

Mike in LA



      

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