Earlier this week when I was inspecting the inside of the foundationless-frame hive, I had to pull out some of the comb that the bees were building because it was interfering with another frame’s space. Later when I was looking at the comb, I noticed that there were eggs inside a healthy portion of the cells. There were no cells that she skipped as she was laying which is a sign of a young and healthy queen. At first I felt guilty about taking away some of her eggs. but in the grand scale of things, 16 eggs is nothing to the 2000 that she lays a days.

In the photos, the white lines inside each cell that look like miniature grains of rice are the eggs. Since they are standing straight up, as opposed to holding a curved shape, I would expect that they are less than one day old.

In addition, here are some photos of the queen herself, taken on the same day that I extracted the above comb. Of course, she is the long black one with the white paint dot on her back.