I did an inspection today, good news and bad from it. The contrast between these hives amazes me every time. I fully understand now why they suggest beginners start with at least two hives.  If I only had the problem hive I am pretty sure I would be beeless by now and out of luck for the year, as well as extremely frustrated with a new hobby.  Instead I have a fabulous first year challenge!  The hive that has been having queen problems appears to be ok. They have accepted the third queen and she is laying.

One of the other hives is doing great. I added a second deep filled with frames of foundation to it today. I had to do a lot of cleanup though. when I first installed all of the packages I placed the inner covers on the hives upside down, creating a gap between the inner cover and the top of the frames, but also putting the inner  entrance as part of the hive rather than part of the hive.  The reasoning is that anything above the inner cover, in this case the upper entrance, is not considered part of the hive and the bees will not defend it.  It was particularly important for me to flip the cover the way I did because I am using gallon jugs willed with 1:1 sugar syrup for bee feed.  If the bees did not defend that entrance then wasps, ants, and other things would be free to wander in and drink from the bee's sugar fountain and not be hassled about it.  The risk with this is that they may build burr comb in the space between the inner cover and the top of the frames, which they finally did sometime since my last inspection. That wasn't too bad, though. What was worse was the mess they were doing on two of the outer frames where they were building comb sideways and in several shelves; all of which had to be cut away. I think I damaged the comb pretty badly doing so. I kind of wish I went with plastic foundation for the brood boxes between this and the warping on a very small number of frames that are not currently in any of the hives. Oh well. A reminder to make sure the frames are all pushed snuggly together to preserve bee space.

The bad news is that the third hive, the one I moved to the middle which had been doing well, is now definitely queenless. The bees just seemed different when I opened it up, you could hear a change, and there were emergency supersedure cells all over two of the frames. Since some of them are capped already I am going to just let them try and raise their own queen. I probably should have given them a frame of brood from the strong hive, but I already took one out 2 weeks ago from that hive for the other weak hive and I really don't want to have to stunt that one's growth any more if I can help it. I will just have to see how they are next time I do an inspection.