You are welcome Cathie, don’t stress too much about it. With spring not officially here yet, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to get a new queen if it doesn’t work out this time. I read that there is a one in seven chance of a new queen failing. Always keep that in mind.
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So … I am delighted to share the good news with you… I have a new laying queen in my main hive after I split off the old queen into a new box 28 days ago! feels like this was the longest 4 weeks of my life!
Keeping in mind Jeff’s caution to do as gentle an inspection as possible, we planned to only stay in long enough to see evidence of a queen so when we saw the first capped brood and larvae we put everything back together as quickly as possible.
In the month the bees have hauled in the honey and every frame appears loaded from the back window, the side frame on the observation window side is fully capped except for a few cells. I did harvest two frames in order to make the super easier to lift and now that I have seen that they have capped honey in the empty frames I gave them in the brood box when I did the split, I will be harvesting another couple of flow frames I think.
The old queen seems to be doing well enough in the new box with a much smaller population. It was so relaxing to look into that box as there’s no super on top and less bees. We did not even need smoke.
So thanks to all who gave me encouragement along the way! I couldn’t have done it without you!
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Ahhh, that is great news Cathie. It’s good for confidence building.
Yesterday I discovered a tiny little swarm turned up at my bee site. At first I thought it was part of one of my small nuc hives that swarmed with the first virgin queen that hatched. Then I discovered that the queen was a mature queen & not a virgin. Blowed if I know. Now I’m thinking that I’m the classic beekeeper who says “not my bees”, when a swarm lands not far from his hives. There wasn’t even enough bees to cover one frame. I took it home & shifted a strong nuc & placed it on that spot for the returning bees to add to their numbers. It’s a nice little colony now.
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@JeffH have you or would you do a vertical split as pre-emptive swarm prevention rather than a walk away or pagden split?
I’ll have to google vertical & pagden splits. I’m not fond of a walk-away split as a preemptive swarm prevention measure on account that I don’t want any of the older bees to go back to the parent hive, on account of SHB’s. My splits probably go unnamed. Sometimes I remove brood frames only. Then use them to bolster weaker colonies. Alternatively I’ll remove brood, bees minus the queen, combine them with brood, bees minus the queen from another colony into a single brood box, then take that away several k’s so that no bees return.
I’ll put 9 frames in a single 10 frame brood box. On occasions I’ll take 3 frames of brood, bees, minus the queen from 3 separate colonies, then combine them into one brood box before closing them up to take away.
This afternoon I took 4 frames of bees from a colony, then added a frame of brood from a high performance queen before bringing them home.
I’m keeping the high performance queen in a single brood box to use as a resource hive for brood to propagate from.
Things don’t always go to plan because the other day I either accidentally killed a good young queen or the colony balled & killed her. Anyway I have that colony split into 4 nucs making new queens. That was where those 4 frames 2 paragraphs back came from.