Experienced beekeeper to adopt my bees

HI, Timothy—are you a HoneyLove member? Forgive me if I don’t remember you, but I go to all the meetings and am the forum moderator so know most of the TBH members.
Firstly, in Spring, the bees are brooding up rapidly if they are healthy. Seasonally, bee’s attitudes are also variable. If you have been inspecting every other week the last four months, can you please advise prospective adopters how many frames of brood are in your colony? Ten bars built out is not very many for a year old hive—have you been harvesting honey regularly?
Second, did your inspections reveal swarm queen cells? The swarming trajectory does not happen in just the short time since your breaking the comb—they must prepare by restricting the queen’s food intake and draw swarm cells and the earliest a queen is capped is after 8 days from a egg. What is the evidence for a swarm? You may have caused absconding by the intervention you described, which is not a organized event.
Who has mentored you over this past year? As you have mentioned, a well educated beek is going to need to assess this hive to see if it still has a viable queen. The ONLY way to know this is to see eggs in the combs.

HI, Timothy Sounds like you want to keep your hive and have the colony transferred into a new box. If so I wouldn’t mind coming over and doing the work. You can reach me at (818) 746-6276

Bruce

Timothy—I was just trying to figure out how you speculate they have swarmed, once or twice, as you wrote. Bearding is not a sign of having swarmed. Bees don’t swarm without a queen, but they may abscond and leave the brood behind after a disturbance. If you killed the queen and they get their act together, they may draw emergency queen cells to replace their lost queen. This requires a larva no older than 4 days of age. They can not make a queen from just any age larva. I would offer the opinion, since it is my particular bent, that doing beekeeping as a “rogue” is not a good practice in the urban environment. Our collective reputations as urban beekeepers must be carefully guarded in consideration of all our neighbors who are not beekeepers. These folks do not appreciate stinging events or swarms from neglected hives. HoneyLove tries very hard to urge people to join our educational community, read the bee literature widely and acquire a mentor. We often hear from folks who drop in only when they are in trouble, and this is not really what we exist to do. I hope you can understand.
Susan

Timothy—My earlier answer is wrong. Since you report NO brood, there has been no laying queen for at least 21 days. A emergency queen cell must be made from a young larva and hatches, at the earliest, 16 days later, or 5 days before the last of the worker brood would emerge. But you report NO worker brood and a capped queen cell. A viable queen would have emerged before the last of the worker brood emerged.
Also, the “beginnings of a emergency cell” are likely a queen cup, which is not a queen cell, and can not have a viable fertilized egg or larva in it anyway—too much time has elapsed since a queen was present.

Hi, Timothy—I tend to look at this with the long view. A queen is not what is needed— You have not gained the skills needed to manage a hive of feral, urban bees and this could be a invitation to later dangerous issues. In our club, there have been incidents of stinging resulting in the death of dogs and chickens, usually by people checking in on the cusp of distress, who we have never heard from before. Again, this is not what HoneyLove (or any bee club, for that matter) exists to do. Bees are wild creatures and we do not control them, but work with them. Solving the issues you have already had with “remote mentoring” is what I have ended up doing, but for you to become a competent beek, you need on-site mentoring with a experienced teacher. Please contact Tyson Kaiser, who I believe is in your area. His website is SweetBeeRemoval, 323-892-4170. He has the experience and skills needed to move you into a better place with beekeeping.