Queenless and bee math

Friday I went into all six hives that I have at my house.

• The CSX split is fine, but not building comb and building up as well as I would like.  I will continue to feed them and try to get them where they need to be for winter.
• Both packages that I started this year are doing fine, but I will continue to to keep feeding them as well.
• The combined split is doing well and should be able to over winter without any further help
• Demeter is queenless!  I did find two superseder cells with capped worker brood around them.  Bee math tells me that if indeed this was a superseder by the hive the queen had just hatched since the queen takes 4 days less to hatch then worker brood which was still surrounding the queen cells.  It takes about 2 weeks for the queen to orient to the hive, do her mating flight and start to lay.  I will check again in two weeks to see if a queen is laying.  

This bottom queen cell looks like it was distroyed by the first emerging queen.

Combining hives

I tried 3 times to get the queenless split up and going by providing eggs w/o any success.  Yesterday I went to look again and they were anxious and no signs of a queen cell so I added them to the other split I made from Demeter using the newspaper method.  I added two sheets of packing paper on top of the split w/ the queen made a few small slashes w/ my hive tool then added both boxes of the queenless hive.  I wanted to just add the deep, but there was still so many bees that I put the medium on as well.  I then put the inner cover on and an empty super (just to make the top entrance easier) then the outer cover.