Bee Update

It's been a little over 3 weeks since Swarmageddon.  Before we left town I went into the hive and found lots of honey and pollen stores, and lots of capped brood (ie: growing babies scheduled to hatch in about a week).  All in all, the departing swarm left things in good order.  I also found about 12 queen cells which are intended to grow into new princesses.  These young ladies then have to fight to the death to determine who will be the new queen.

But I was worried that there were too many queen cells (if more than one survives, then the hive will be broken up but yet another swarm(s).  And there is only about an 80% chance of any of the princesses growing up to be functional queens--apparently fighting to the death and then getting eaten by a bluejay happens from time to time.  So I took half of the bees, honey, and brood and two of the queen cells and moved them to my back up box.  I left the other half of the bees, honey, brood, and two queen cells in the main hive.  And the rest of the queen cells were destroyed.

The idea is that in three weeks a new Queen will be hatched, mated, and laying eggs.  Since I have two boxes, I could end of with:
-two queens (sweet!)
-1 queen (and then I could recombine the two boxes into one larger hive
-or no queens (bummer!). 

Fast forward to the present.... yesterday I checked on my backup box.  Hmmm, no eggs, no brood.  This hive is on borrowed time since all of the workers are growing old and there is not a younger generation.  The main hive also has a lot of senior citizens, and no eggs, but I did find a queen.  A queen... but she should have started laying eggs by now.  Maybe she hasn't because the weather has been too bad to take a mating flight?  Or maybe everything is going slow because it's been cool and rainy?  Maybe she's just redecorating the nursery?  Or worst case, maybe she's infertile.  I'll give it another week, at which point we'd need to come up with a new queen ASAP.

Here are the bees resting in the backup box for bedtime: