Hello Beekeepers,
As some of you are approaching 1 week since install, you will want to check for queen acceptance. What a beekeeper needs to do is to go into the hive and look for eggs. When you see eggs or small larvae, we can assume the bees have accepted the queen and the hive will move forward. If you do not see eggs or small larvae there is a small possibility that your queen was not accepted, or the queen was killed during the installation of the package. Keep in mind it can take up to 14 days for a queen to start laying. Sometimes new beekeepers cannot see eggs. But when the larvae start growing, they are easy to see.
This is probably the most important thing to check for after hiving a package. Failure to check for queen acceptance can lead to the package turning to laying workers if no queen is present. After two to three weeks of hiving and no queen pheromone is present, workers ovaries can develop and they will start laying eggs. Being they have not been mated, all of the eggs are unfertilized and will be drones. Once the hive turns to laying workers it is a challenge to turn them around.
Even though your queen is marked, resist the temptation of looking for the queen during initial inspection. The more the frames are disturbed the odds of accidentally killing her go up. If I see eggs I know the queen has been accepted. If I don’t see eggs I close up the hive and come back a few days later to check. Again I will look for eggs. If I see them I am good to go. Give the queen up to 14 days to start laying. If there still is no eggs you will want to see if you can find your queen. She should be easy to find since she is marked. If a queen already exists in a colony, the bees will kill the new queen installed in the hive. If you are queenless, you can install another queen.
If a new queen would need to be installed, you would do so using the slow release method. A marshmallow is not a slow release. Candy in the queen cage is the proper method.
The image shows the stage of larval growth. From egg to capped brood.
