I wish I brought my camera to inspection today. I saw two cool guard bee acts. For the first there was a horsefly hanging out a couple of inches away from the reduced entrance on the bottom board. A bee flew out of the entrance and rammed right into the fly butt first, getting rid of the fly while the bee squirmed on its back trying to right itself.  The second was a bee escorting a hive beetle out of the front entrance of the hive. It was just pushing it along and herding it until it got the thing out the door. Pretty neat to see them taking care of things like that. I did see a good number of those beetles. I killed 3 in the hive with the lowest bee population, and I saw a few more in the other two hives as well.

Something is definitely up with the hive that killed its first queen. I couldn't find the new queen or any eggs. There is larva, but only about 50 and they are all very large and beginning to have their cells capped. It appears they are capping them as drone cells too which isn't good news.  This means the queen may have never mated or just has other issues that she is laying drones instead of workers. The six or so capped cells I did see were all done as domed drone cells, so I definitely need to do something more with this hive.  There is some good news with this hive at least.  I was concerned about its very low population, and at the advice of members of the Philadelphia Beekeepers Guild I switched its position with one of the outer hives.  Italian bees are not known for having the best navigation skills, and since all of these hives look similar, are close together and have entrances pointing nearly the same way there is a good chance the bees from the middle hive are drifting to the outer two hives when they come back from foraging.  About a week ago I swapped hive locations between the middle hive and the eastern most hive and it definitely had an effect. The problem hive's population is way up, though the hive that is now in the middle has a lower population. It has lots of new bees, though, so I just need to see if I can stop them from drifting so much.

Today I also noticed that the two stronger hives' wax production dropped off a lot more than I thought it would. I was expecting to put two new deeps on today, but instead they still have 4 frames each to draw out.  If I had to guess it's due to the aging bees from the package. If I remember correctly, bees are most capable of wax production between 10 and 20 days of age, in which case the wax reduction would make sense since all of the original bees are now at absolute minimum 27 days old. Good thing I saw lots of newly born bees in those two hives!