Swarm Confirmation and Supersedure

Well, I think I've got a confirmation that the Thistle hive swarmed. Earlier this week I was talking to our backyard neighbor, he had said there was extremely high bee activity happening on our property line around June 4th. It was only for a day, so I assume that about half of the Thistle hive took off with the queen. Usually a swarm will leave the hive and regroup within 50 feet of their hive, then they'll send out scouts to look for a permanent location. I assume my bees hung out around the fence and then moved on.

A new queen only takes about 16 days to hatch, since I saw queen cells around the end of May, I figured it was ok to take a peek inside of the Thistle hive to see if she had started laying eggs yet. If she hasn't it's no big deal, it's still early. A new queen hatches, then kills any other younger queens that didn't hatch (eliminating the competition). After that she goes on a mating flight where she mates with several drones, then she returns to the hive to start laying eggs. That whole process is probably not complete quite yet.

Inside of the Thistle hive, there were a lot of empty cells and a lot of capped brood. No larvae and no eggs. Worker bee larvae gets capped with wax around 9 days after a queen lays an egg, then hatches 21 days after the egg has been laid. That means that the queen must have been in the hive between June 2nd and June 14th, but then she left - so our neighbors account of a ton of bees swarming on the 4th lines up exactly with what is happening inside the hive. I actually didn't see any queen cells, but perhaps the bees have cleaned them up by now. I'll check for eggs in the next few weeks just to make sure everything is going well with the new queen.

Now to the Mint hive - there has been extremely low activity in front of the Mint hive. During the middle of the day, when there should be peak activity in front of the hive, there are only 2 or 3 bees coming in or out of the hive:

The Thisle hive, even after swarming, looks more like this (these pictures were both taken within minutes of each other):

So something definitely seems wrong with the Mint hive. When I opened up the hive, there were extremely few bees, and supersedure cells everywhere. Supersedure cells are cells used for growing queens. When a hive wants to swarm, they build swarm cells - also used for growing queens. The only difference between the two is that swarm cells are usually built along the bottom of the frame, the existing queen will take half the bees and leave, and a queen that hatches from a swarm cell will take over. Supersedure cells are built all over the frame and are used to replace a failing or non-existent queen, when the new queens hatch they will kill the old queen. The long cells are supersedure cells that have hatched (well, only one of them hatched, then that queen went around to all the un-hatched cells, opened them, and "took care" of the competition):

So it looks like either A) The Mint bees didn't like their queen and replaced her, or B) The Mint queen died and they replaced her. Apparently this is quite common with packages (Mint was a new package this spring). On the bright side, I saw one frame that had about 1/4 of the cells filled with eggs and 1/4 of the cells filled with larvae - so it would seem that there is currently a queen in residence.