the first is sheba, who is the daughter of jamaica and granddaughter of astoria. she has the hive that astoria lived in.
sheba is lovely and dark like her mother and is already on the job, trying to rebuild the population of her hive, which was severely decreased when astoria passed away early this spring.
the next new queen is orla, now head of the hive jamaica swarmed from. she is jamaica's daughter. she hatched after a secondary swarm from jamaica's hive happened on may 28th. the secondary swarm took off with the little black virgin queen we spotted previously. we weren't home to catch the swarm, however, even if we had been, they clustered 30' up in a tree behind the hive, so we wouldn't have been able to capture them.
anyways, we found orla in the hive during our inspection on june 5th. she is golden!
we saw the third new queen in our four-frame nuc. she is also jamaica's daughter. she's already got all kinds of eggs, larva and brood in her little home. we used one of jamaica's extra swarm cells to get her. she is striped! we decided to call her dido.
finally, on a very sad note, we have to report that we were unable to see rosie in her hive last wednesday, but found the hive full of emergency cells. we can only surmise that something happened to her during the previous inspection we did - either we lost her or squished her. it is incredibly sad, she was really beautiful and a very good queen. this was our first attempt at an artificial swarm. i must say everything went terribly wrong. we culled nearly a dozen excess cells from the hive on the 6th, and we're waiting for rosie's daughter with great anticipation - she's due on the 12th or 13th.
