Missing a Queen

One of my hives seems to have lost its queen.  This north hive has no brood and I had mistakenly cut off all of the queen cells that they had made to replace the queen thinking that I was keeping them from swarming.  I think they had already swarmed, and I was only preventing them from replacing  the queen who had left.  So, I added some brood frames from the other healthy hive last week and checked this week to see if they were working on a new queen.  There are still quite a few bees present, and this frame shows lots of honey (the white capped cells around the edges) and pollen (the dark cells in the middle)

This frame seems to be almost full of just pollen.  They seemed to have filled in much of the empty brood cells with pollen and honey in this hive.

The little cups along the bottom (right side) of this frame are queen cups -- the beginnings of queen cells -- though I didn't notice that they had larva in them yet.

This frame had a completed queen cell, and maybe two -- one of them I wasn't sure.  They are covered with bees here so hard to see.  So they did use some of the brood that I gave them last week to start at least one queen.  I added another brood frame from the other hive during this inspection to give them more material to work with in creating a new queen.  I think that I will wait three weeks to inspect again to give them time to get a new queen going, I hope.

This is a frame completely full of capped honey from the healthy hive.  They have two and a half, at least, boxes full of capped honey frames and I added a sixth box that they have just started to draw out with wax.

The have also built comb between the boxes and filled it with honey that makes a bit of a mess when I take the boxes apart for inspection.

This frame full of capped brood in the healthy hive shows me that there is a good active queen in that hive.

My garden continues to do well.  This is my ornamental gourd patch.

These are pumpkins and melons, with zucchini at the far end.

Here are my three plantings of sweet corn, with the final planting just starting to emerge, and the first one about knee high.

My tomatoes are filling out their cages and growing quickly.

I have lots of these green tomatoes on the plants.

Here I have, from front to back, broccoli, cabbage, brussel sprouts, cucumbers with their supporting frames now up, and finally pole beans and peas in the back.