Supersedure Cell

Sarah came over this weekend to watch a bee inspection. We have been blissfully floating through beehood. But there were a few bumps in the road this last time. Our second hive is not flourishing like we had hoped. We got them started too late, their numbers were too low and one thing I didn't mention when we installed the hive is all of the larva that was lost. They were in their temporary box for 2 weeks and spent all their time drawing out the comb and raising young. However, our box was a different size, so we couldn't take those frames when we took the bees. That means they had to start from scratch, drawing out the comb and raising new brood. It takes about 3 weeks to "grow" new bees, so by this weekend we should have a new batch to help the hive out. The main nectar flow is about over though, so we will have to feed them sugar syrup to get through the winter.
The main point of this point though, is about our first hive. The hive with the black queen. We never saw this queen, but we did find a partial one of these (not my picture):


Which we mistook for a swarm cell. A swarm cell is made when the hive runs out of space. They stop feeding the old queen so she is light enough to fly, they make a new queen by feeding a substance called royal jelly to a larva, the larva turns into a queen and half the hive leaves with the old queen. This is where both of our sets of bees came from. Swarming is bad when you are trying to make honey, because you lose half your workers.
This however was a supersedure cell. The difference is the location of the cell and the reason for the cell. Supersedure cells are high on a frame, while swarm cells are low. I haven't kept up on my reading, so we saw the cell and immediately removed it thinking they wanted to swarm - something that is almost impossible to prevent once they want to. Supersedure cells are made when the queen dies, when the queen isn't productive enough or if the queen runs out of sperm (she mates only once in her life). After reading this I was really worried we had ruined their only chance for making a new queen, especially since we had not seen her. Aaron opened them up again today to add a new super (box) and found the queen and a new supersedure cell. I was so relieved that she is probably just not laying enough from the worker's point of view. A commercial beekeeper would requeen with a queen ordered from a beekeeping company. We are taking a more natural approach and letting the bees do what is best for them. They know how to fix their situation better than we do. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. I read somewhere that sometimes in this situation the two queens will coexist until the older queen dies. I always thought there could never be more than one queen, so I'll have to look into that some more. We are definitely always learning something from those bees!