Not every day on the roof ends the way you want it to. Today was one of those.
We skipped The First entirely. It’s still a young colony, and at this stage the best thing we can do for it is leave it alone—every time you crack open a hive, you cost the bees time and energy re-sealing propolis, restabilizing temperature, and calming back down. The First doesn’t need us in there right now. It needs to be left to keep doing what it’s already doing well.
The real reason we suited up today was the OG hive. This is the one we’ve been watching the longest without actually watching it. Back on day 75, we found two strong queen cells and left them to develop. On days 85 and 88, we deliberately chose to stay out of the brood box entirely, giving a virgin queen space to make her orientation and mating flights without disruption. That’s the right call in the early going. But at some point, staying out stops being patience and starts being avoidance. Today was the day we finally had to go back in and look.
We went through the OG frame by frame. Meticulously. Not a glance — a real, thorough check, looking for the one thing that would tell us everything: fresh eggs.
We found nothing.
No eggs. No sign the queen is laying. If she mated and made it back, she isn’t producing yet. If something happened to her out there, the hive doesn’t know it needs a new one — or it hasn’t managed to raise one.
That’s a hard thing to see. This hive has been broodless for weeks now while we waited, which means its population has been shrinking every day. No new eggs mean no new bees to replace those that are naturally dying off. A hive can absorb that for a while, but not forever. At some point, the workforce gets too thin to keep the colony running, let alone recover.
We’re not pulling the trigger yet, though. We’re giving it one more chance. On Sunday, we’ll go back in and check again. If there are still no eggs at that point, we’ll buy a mated queen and introduce her to the hive directly, rather than continuing to gamble on one that may not exist.
I won’t pretend today didn’t sting a little. We’ve been rooting for this hive since we split it, and “still nothing” after this long is a real letdown. But beekeeping runs on this kind of patience, and sometimes the patience doesn’t pay off the way you hoped. The hive isn’t dead. It’s not too late. We just have to make the right call, and Sunday will tell us what that call is.
More soon.