Eva,
I read your reply on my cell phone and didn’t see your entire message. Your outline is accurate and thanks for that summary. To answer some of your questions, there is a marked queen from the nuc. She was moved into a brood box with a frame of brood, two frames loaded with honey, and some empty frames. Right or wrong, I’m counting on her to sort things out and build out that brood box while I wait to see what happens with the other two hives.
We are just getting into summer up here in the mountains of North Carolina, with lots of wildflowers waiting to bloom. So I don’t think nectar will be an issue.
There has been so much disruption in the other two hives that I’m planning to let everything settle down for 10 days to 2 weeks and see if they both requeen themselves, and to watch the activity at the entrance. So far I haven’t seen any decrease in activity from the first hive. Lots of activity and the Flow honey super continues to get filled. It’s about 80-90% full of capped honey. I’m guessing that the bees have been getting nectar from the Black Locust trees and wild rhododendrons.
I’m also seeing more activity in the second hive split, presumably since the hatched brood are now foraging? So again, as long as the activity looks positive, I think I should leave all three hives alone and then reinspect them 10-14 days from now. If the first hive still doesn’t have a queen or capped queen cells, then I guess I need to decide if I should buy a queen, or transfer the recently purchased queen from the nuc into that hive. If I have to transfer her, then I plan to cage her up and see how that hive reacts to her, before releasing her into that original hive.
On a side note, it’s puzzling to me how I got here and how it got so complicated, so quickly. I only just transferred the original nuc into my first brood box in early April. We had light snow that day, and the first wildflowers were just barely starting to bloom. I was surprised at how quickly the bees filled out the other five empty, foundationless frames. It was in a matter of 3-4 weeks. Had I been more experienced, perhaps I would have recognized the need to add a second story brood box or honey super, but I didn’t. It wasn’t long after that when I saw bees bearding at the entrance. This being my first year with considerable inexperience, I can’t imagine managing 5, 10, or 30 hives!
This forum has been invaluable to me. I’ve tried reaching out to some local beekeepers but was really turned off by their advice. On of them was calling me a “newbie” in every other sentence, and both of them kept throwing more and more pitfalls at me, rather than what I hoped was a path forward.
Thanks for your help,
Joe
sounds like it’s time to harvest a few of those frames! (You don’t have to wait for them to all be full & capped, in case you were wondering)
Sadly this is far from the first time I’ve heard that - and I’ve dealt with it too. A big part is because of the common misconceptions about the Flow hive system, but that doesn’t explain all of it because there’s a very insular & skeptical vibe I get from the bee club I joined and I haven’t yet mentioned Flow as a newcomer. Reading the room during several online meetings and still feeling like a stranger, I decided to bide my time. I’m hoping this changes when there’s a live event.