Drones overtaking workers

Read this on another blog:

"[The hive] had far too many drones, and some spotty drone babies still hatching out. That’s a good sign that there is no queen in the hive, as the Queen is the only bee in the hive that has the ability to lay worker-bee -or Fertilized- eggs. The worker bees can lay unfertilized eggs that turn into drones. There are many reasons why a Queen could have died. She could have been squished by a clumsy beekeeper (gasp! Never!) or munched by a wasp, or she could have swarmed late in the year and the bees didn’t have enough time to raise another Queen before the cold wet weather comes."

I know we saw the queen a month ago, but missed her the last few times, and I wonder at the crazy high number of drones we saw today, it's really outta control, far too many.

will seek more info,
-=pj=-

A New Hive!!!

On friday june 10 we installed a nuc into our new top bar hive.

Glyphosate, Monsanto, and Bees

It will probably be glyphosate they spray on the train tracks, which is RoundUp.  Most things I read said that it probably was OK for the bees.  But even if it doesn't hurt the bees, Monsanto is evil.
http://forum.beemaster.com/index.php?topic=14353.0;wap2

On a happier note, here's one of our bees enjoying the cotone-aster.

 I saw at least 5 kinds of insects on this plant. Not sure what kind of bee this is.

Two kinds of bumblebees

Not sure what these last two are.

Brief Inspection

After some cloudy days and showers, yesterday and today are warm and sunny like summer is finally here. I was eager to see how much the bees had progressed since the last time we looked, when there were still only about 3 frames of bees. As soon as I opened the top I saw burr comb, partly filled with honey, and something else? I wasnt sure.

Comb on the tops of the frames

Comb on the inner cover.

I lifted out frame # 1 and # 10 just to see how the edges were looking. Frame #1 had honey storage on the inside, but the track side was empty. #10 still had nothing on it.

I removed the burr Comb to a pie plate and it can easily be seen (despite the blurriness of the pic, sorry) that the queen was laying there. "She must be low on room" I thought, and so put the other deep on top. the old comb in those frames is not very nice, but I thought it would be better than a short honey super.