I opened this hive to perform a split. We have significant bee bearding in the front and huge afternoon orientation flights. Upon inspection we see most of the space completely filled with brood and only small areas at the edges for resource storage. Very early signs of swarm cells were found but none which had eggs.
6 frames were moved over to the new hive location. I was unable to find a queen so I made sure that the splits both had good numbers of bees, eggs, brood and resources. We will open both hive in late July to look for signs of queens.
All hives were opened and verified to have eggs. The bees have been busy and we see a huge amount of honey being packed into the supers. Two colonies were given a second honey super. We may need to consider harvesting sooner this year.
All three hives were inspected. The original mother queen is laying in the new hive location. Inside the original mother colony split, a virgin queen has emerged and is walking the frame, no eggs present yet. On the rescued commercial hive, a virgin queen has emerged and no eggs present yet.
Note: on the rescued commercial colony, the virgin queen was spotted on the frame. However, almost immediately, the virgin queen took flight and disappeared overhead. I left the lid to the colony off for approximately 15-20 minutes. Hopefully she returned to the box. Also note: the sky overhead was full of dragon flies. My fear is that she did not return. Just in case, I took a frame of eggs from the original mother queen and placed that frame in the colony.
These hives continue to perform extremely well. These hives were purchased from Dakota bees. I plan to purchase form this supplier next year. These bees are very hearty and fast growing.
Most of the hives have filled out the double deep brood chambers and we some are even filling out the honey supers. They are fast growers and heavy on nectar foraging.
This hive contains a wild swarm that was caught earlier this month. This colony is doing very well and actually I am a bit concerned that they may swarm again. The problem is that I do not have a desire to purchase any more plastic hive bodies. I may perform a split into a 5 frame nuc box.
The newer colony purchased and installed in May was shown to be queen-less. There are no signs of the queen. No eggs or developing larva. All capped brood was interspersed widely distributed drone brood. A laying worker is present.
The wild colony which over-wintered was inspected. This colony shows immediate signs of swarming. I found tree different frames with swarm cells. The double deep brood box was split. The queen was moved with the half split to a new deep brood box to imitate a swarm. The original box was verified to have two frame with swarm cells.
The commercial purchased colony which was missing a queen was given a frame with capped queen cells.
In this instance we were able to turn a bad situation with only one viable colony into 3 viable colonies. An inspection will be performed in 2 weeks to verify that the queens have emerged.
All hives were inspected. Careful attention placed on amount of space and if each colony was queenright. We quickly ran out of additional deep brood boxes, so in those instances, honey supers were added to provide time until new equipment arrived. Each colony is growing quickly and just now beginning to store honey.
Some cross comb was seen in a few of the brood boxes. These 8 frame boxes are a bit strange on the size. You can squeeze a 9th frame into the box, just barely. In those instances, we added a 9th frame to take up the space.
The double yellow wild hive which was split earlier was inspected. No signs of a virgin queen were seen. As an insurance policy, a new frame of eggs was added from the original mother colony.
Hive inspections were performed. All hives are doing extremely well. These commercial colonies are strong and moving very quickly. Large brood stores are seen, and large honey stores are being formed. We plan to move these colonies into double deep brood chambers and then add honey supers very soon.
We had checked on this hive two week ago. The queen was laying a full brood pattern and there were about 6 frames full of capped brood. If we did not split them, I fear they would indeed swarm on their onw. So, we caught the queen and moved her over to a new location with her own deep from the original hive. I shook a few frames into the original hive and made sure the original box had fresh eggs and 1-3 day old larva. This queen was sourced from a wild swarm catch on the campus about 3 years ago. She actually appeared to have been a failed queen but a new location solved the problem.
The original double deep yellow hive body was split into two. The original bottom yellow box stayed in place. The top yellow box with the queen went to the corner and is now the Yellow Orange hive body.
I was informed of a swarm through an online neighborhood messaging. We went over and quickly began work removing the bees. In hindsight the bees were much to high up for us to safely catch. In the end we did manage to catch the swarm but I would never do that again. I should be more careful.
Ultimately because of the bees being just out reach, tucked tightly in the tree borough, and not on a “shakable” branch, I decided to mount a NUC box up in the tree. The bees promptly marched into the box in about 20 minutes.
I installed kept the colony locked up until the next morning. During the morning hours when the temperatures were low around 55, I transferred the frames into the plastic hive. The plastic hive has queen excluders on the entrance, so I made sure the workers could travel but the queen would remain. The chance of leaving is small, the plastic hive has fully drawn out old brood frames with several full resource frames from last years dead out.
The owner of the property called be back the next day and asked if I would come back by to retrieve a few bees which were lost of the swarm. It is typical for bees to become lost during a swarm and not make it into the “catch”. Normally the bees will either go back to the original hive, join another hive or die off. I ran back over with a homemade bee-vac and gently removed them from the kids tree house. We will add these bees to a weak hive during the dark hours of night.
