2012-01-22 Northcote check - harvest and a queen-less hive

Beautiful day, let's see what the bees are up to.....

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first the 'Other', on the right.

Under the hive mat... 

 Loads of honey!.

I won't bore you of snaps of frame after frame of honey.....

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This one below is one of the oldest ones, I deliberately put it where it would fill up so I could get the honey out of it, it had been almost full for probably a year or so....?

One of the oldest frames we have. Lumpy-style.

 In the brood box, a few not-so full frames

 And some full ones.

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.Not so flash over in Metropolis...

 This is the dis-assembled boxes waiting to be put back on...

Down in the brood box...no bloody brood at all.
No grubs

Bugger. 

Queenless.

I noticed the check before (a few weeks ago now, things got a little bit slack over the summer break) that Metropolis had a lot of drone brood, but I hadn't predicted this....

Hopefully I can get a queen in there before it goes completely pear-shaped.

Actually, I think I'll chuck a couple of frames of fresh eggs in there from the Other hive, I've heard that this way they can make their own new queen....if it doesn't die out first.

Despite this disaster, I pulled 8 full frames out of the Other, and 4 out of Metropolis.

There's gonna be some spinning.

UPDATE:
2012-01-29 - grubs in Metropolis
After a failed attempt to order a new queen last week (Do not order bees before Australia Day holiday - she  will arrive dead or not at all...) I decided to swap a few frames of brood / eggs from The Other into Metropolis, to let the bees make their own queen from scratch. Once I opened them both up, ready to start swapping, I noticed that there were small grubs in there. Whew. So, what does this mean? Maybe I lost a queen a few weeks ago, the girls raised their own queen from a fresh egg, and she has only just started laying? This seem the most likely. They always surprise you, these things.