It looks like all seems going good for you! Originality you said you moved the queen into the hive, now I see you moved a queen cell, queen hatched and she had to go for a mating flight, in swarms like this I usually wait for 2 to 3 weeks before I look for eggs. Eggs are sometimes hard to spot for a newbie and untrained eye. When you moved the hive with bits and pieces of comb with it, bees will always repair and build comb even if there is no queen present. Looks like you have another hive going in the culvert....as I suspected, a handful of bees without queen would not stay and build comb, they would simply move on and look for a home in another hive. Konrad

Not much you can do and I wouldn't worry about,...honeybees love to fly much farther then your boundaries, around 4 miles. What bees are you seeing currently, also honey bees?

The bird houses were very inexpenive kits that had small precut wood and fiberboard as piece parts. The small round opening was originally for a chickadee size. I blocked the holes and added some seperate compartments about 3x3 inches each, before putting on the small roof. A wad of plain cotton was added to each partition and small 3/8 inch to 1/2 inch diameter holes were drilled to enter into each seperate compartment. I knew that these were used, as a woodpecker had detected something and tried to peck big holes around the tiny openings, but didn't succeed. I also have a 6x6 inch chunk of wood that I drilled many various sized holed about 5 inches deep all over the four sides. Its way up on a pole with a metal trash can cover acting as a roof. Not sure if all the areas are activly supporting bees, but I also have a large mason been house that has 6 inch long tubes that are 5/16 inch in diameter, and are grouped together. They have liners inside each tube and these get replaced once per year, after the bees used the tubes. There are about 100 tubes per nest. The mason bee lays several eggs in the tubes and adds food, then plugs up the opening with mud. They hibernate and then wake up the following spring and eat the food, while opening up the end of the tubes. They are the earliest bees, earlier than even any other pollinating insect. They are noticably gone once the warmer weather is here, about mid April. By then, some of my fruit trees have been flowering already, and have been pollinated. Adding any moisture or sugar to the cotton can cause it to mold. The bumble bees treat the cotton like a bird would do for building a nest.

i started a patch with very fresh seed that was given to me in the fall by a friend who grows it to sell in his herb business. He told me to rake up the soil surface, scatter the seed, lightly cover it and water it in, letting the leaves fall over it as they may. I did this and it came up nicely in the spring. My little patch is thriving after 5 years. It does go dormant in late summer. I planted it in the woods where I had cleared out weeds and honeysuckle under a grove of oaks. I planted another small patch a few weeks later, but the seed had already gone into dormancy and it didn't come up until the second spring. It too is thriving now. The soil is general woodland soil, not wet or too dry, just average. I don't take any special pains to keep it watered, it is fine on its own. I don't rake the leaves out or tidy up the patch. It seems to grow well in the same woods with trilliums, solomon's seal, mayapple and dogtooth violets. It is primarily a deciduous woods with oaks, dogwoods, hackberry, wild cherry, and some elm. Sandy