Fun with lots of bees!
I had lots of fun with some of my mentees last night, we did a reverse Doolittle double split. They were reminding me...the nurses and the queen go in the new hive with the open brood that need the nurses. Then the capped brood that we left in the original location will emerge and that hive will have foragers and nurses again. It is great when newer beekeepers really get a new concept.
Doing the double
The reasons we did this split as a double was two-fold. First there were LOTS of bees in one deep and two mediums. And second, there were both open and capped queen cells. If we had left the open and the capped queen cells together, the colony could have sent an after-swarm. Of course, we could have killed all the younger cells, and this is what we did when they were together on a frame with older ones. We also found the queen and moved her. We didn't have to find the queen, because we were shaking all the frames into the new hive to move the nurses, we would have incidentally moved her along with them. By splitting the queen cells, capped brood, and foragers into two hives, we give ourselves a little insurance. The two with queen cells may be a little weak for a while, but they are adequate for mating new queens.
But, what if...
If one of the new queens doesn't return from her mating flight, or if the old queen leaves with a swarm anyway, (very likely since there were already capped queen cells in the hive), we can re-combine. We have essentially given ourselves a queen in the bank. Feeding these three colonies will help them grow strong for the fruit bloom flow that is coming. The only tricky part here is how to get the foragers into both of the colonies with queen cells. The queen and nurses have been moved across the apiary. The foragers will return to the old location. What we decided to do was stack both of the queen-cell colonies atop one another at the old location. One of them will need to be moved 5 miles away early in the morning in order to keep its foragers with it. If the top one is taken off and left in the yard, it will lose its bees to the old location again. Moving it is really the only way to keep it strong enough.
Second Thoughts?
After I do a bee job like this, I always question myself, Did I do the right thing? Was there some clue I missed that would have directed me differently? In retrospect, I like the way this came out, though I didn't think of the need to move one of the queen-cell colonies until later. In one week we'll know if moving the queen was enough to get her to stay even after she had already decided it was time to swarm. In 3 weeks we'll know whether our virgin queens made it back from mating, and we can make new decisions from there. T
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