The King, is Back, It All Begins Again

The king of flowers- is the King Flower, that flower that site in the middle of the Himalayan Blackberry and pops open first. Its the king, as it heralds the blackberry- evil invader- and the explosion of nectar that is about to happen.

I have no idea what fed bees before there were invasive species.  Its called a dearth, between Maple and Blackberry- and if there were no blackberry, that dearth would never end til the next year. How did it work in the old days?

The King Flower is center and top, and, I don't really get why it is there. Is it warming up the pollinators to get them moving in the right direction? Like a flag? What pollinators?

Here's a late King Flower, a few minutes ago, lots of other flowers about that are further along, but this one is just waking up.

I have been combining hives, with the mantra that bigger is better than more- from 50 Years Among the Bees, a great read, and I think I am hovering below 20 now. Three hives had symptoms of CBPV, and I received three nice emails from the bee entomologist at the USDA in Maryland, who asked that I collect live infected bees, and freeze them, and send them with dry ice to her office. I wrote her back and said I killed them all already, as she was on vacation. i asked if I should destroy the equipment and if the virus would survive off a bee. 

She said use Clorox and radiation. But the RNA in a virus needed a bee. I said, I don't know how to clorox foundation, should I destroy it? She said Clorox will kill the virus. That took like 4 emails. I still have absolutely zero idea if a virus can survive or not. Its like I wasn't meant to know, and though she was very nice and responsive, and I put my question in bold, I still didn't know. Still don't. I already stuck some supers back on the hives. I suffer from the disease of wishful thinking, fairly consistently 

Tomorrow I will go through a hive which is a mystery. Its one of the best I had, but the queen died, and I missed it, and it ended up with laying workers, And I put in a new queen with two stolen frames of brood and eggs, knowing that the chances were slim. And I left for a week, and came back,,,

And there was no brood, and no queen. Another 35$ out the window ( I lost 4 bought queens this year- but, I don't have other hobbies. So what. Grrr.). 

BUT. I went through the frames, one by one, and on one obscure frame, there were four or five supercedure cells, all capped, all looking reasonable. The math makes no sense. If they killed the queen, and kept the eggs, it seems like there should be a bunch of capped worker cells- for the eggs that they did not use to supercede. And- I was just gone a week- what happened to all that brood?

Part of the issue is keeping math straight in one's head. I am not sure I have it right. 

Tomorrow I will check it out- my expectation is that there will be no queen. No brood. Just a lot of activity as if they were still OK- but really, not.