Think we now know what happened :)

[gingerbees]

Six weeks ago we went to our hive and found it had swarmed and the swarm was in a nearby tree. Prior to this we hadn't seen the normaly very visable Queen for three weeks, but had seen a coupe of Queen cells.

So we caught the swarm and placed in a spare hive.

Since then we have not seen a Queen or brood in either hives till yesterday.

To our relief upon inspection we had a Queen in the swarm hive , with lots of eggs, grubs and capped brood.

In the other hive we saw no eggs, grubs or brood BUT they did look like they were getting the hive ready, and then we spotted a new Queen ( now marked ).

To say we were relieved was an under statement. Both hives have lots of bees and stores over 7 or 8 frames, and now we know they both have Queens.

So in our limited knowledge we think that the events leading up to this were :

Queen died in hive 1
Queen cells made
Both hatched, one Queen caste swarmed and mated quickly, which is why this hive is full of brood now.
The Queen in the original hive took longer to mate but is there.

Does that seem like a logical sequence of events ? its all we can think of to explain what has happened

 

[oliver90owner]

More logical was that it swarmed a week earlier than the cast, that you recovered.

RAB

 

[gingerbees]

we thought that but the hive was full to busrting before and after we lost sight of the old Queen and we could see no evidence that the old queen had swarmed. we are up there everyday at least twice and saw no swarms, nether did the beekeep in the field next to ours.

If the original hive wasnt so fulll we would have thought the same thing. The only thought we had was that we squashed the old Queen by mistake on an inspection ? its a bit of a mystery, two hives with new queens, no sign the old queen swarmed and no loss of bees other than the new queen swarm ?