I've read about the "queenless roar", the loud noise that comes from a queenless, unhappy hive, but I've never actually heard it myself. After the swarming, we kept hearing what we thought was another swarm of bees. We kept craning our necks, looking up into trees but could never see a swarm. While we were getting a crick in our neck we were also keeping a eye on the hive in the tree. They were acting...different. Not much coming and going to gather.
The more I watched the more I fretted about it until I finally decided that too many signs were pointing to a queenless hive and made the decision to fetch them down. Well, ask someone else to fetch them down.
I don't have any pictures of the actual fetching because I was too busy holding the ladder and praying we didn't drop the whole schmear. So I'll have to tell you about it and you can use your imagination. A long ladder was borrowed from the neighbor and my hapless helper climbed up with a crowbar and a rope. He taped the hole closed because I knew that all that prying and thumping was bound to put a lot of bees in the air and we wanted to avoid that as much as possible since the whole operation was being performed 30 feet off the ground and my helper was...nervous. Then he tied the box to the tree with the rope and went to work with the crowbar. It came relatively easy and then he lowered the box to me on the ground.
I had set up a sort of table with a board on 2 sawhorses and gathered all the equipment together I thought I might need.
I knew the comb would be hanging from the top so we tried to pry the top loose and lift the comb out but, of course, I broke it:
So the front was opened as well to give me better access:
You can see, in the bottom, the remains of when the box was briefly a starling nest. There was also a mummified bird in the bottom. Gross, man.
I got busy and forgot to take pictures. But what I found inside confirmed my suspicions: no eggs, no larvae, tons of drones and only a small amount of capped brood. And lots and lots of hatched queen cells:
So this is where I whipped out my hands-down, most important beekeeping tool. I called my Bee Guy, told him the situation and asked if he knew someone who could sell me a queen at this late date (I actually did the cut-out about mid-June). He told me that he had recently captured a very tiny hive and would be happy to give them to me. So over the mountain I drove to get my saving grace. When I got them home I set the box next to the cutout hive and stared at them thinking of all the things that could go wrong. I finally decided that most of the those what-if's were out of my control, the rest are beyond my expertise and just plunked my hive down on top.
Taking a hive from the Bee Guy means that I'm using his equipment and beekeeping philosophy but that's a small price to pay and I'm OK with that for now.
So here is the Bee Guy's deep super with the donated hive and queen and my cutout hive sitting on top. Afterward, I was reading that it is best to put a single sheet of newspaper between the boxes when combining hives. Oops. The top super is empty except for some of the honey from the cutout so the ladies don't go hungry while they set up shop.
By evening all the bees had come down from the tree and decided that this new house isn't so bad.
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