I think I’m going to leave the hive alone for a couple weeks maybe. It’ll be hard ;). I just want to know what’s going on.
There are plenty of bees and so many that they are clustering on the bottom screen and have been for several weeks. I had some family business to attend to and had to be away for about 3 weeks so wasn’t able to monitor what was happening. I wanted to do a split when I got back because I suspected they might want to swarm, given the large population.
So instead of doing a split I put one of the prepared brood boxes into the hive stack, mingling some frames of honey and pollen with empty frames. But even with the added empty brood box several dozen bees are still living on the bottom screen board.