11-27-2015 Split hive didn't make it

We were down for thanksgiving yesterday and checked on the hive.  The silver top hive was going pretty strong and even had bees in the top hive box.  But, the hive that was made from a split was toast.  There was a big pile of bees on the bottom screen.  Probably should have been feeding them more.

The plan for next year should probably be to re-queen this hive and get another queen for a second hive for a split.

5-17-2015 Another split attempt and adding a deep super

Apparently the previous attempt to split the hive didn't take.... and the silver top hive was busting at the seams (and even had some queen cells... see above pictures).  So, I took the frames with queen cells and put it in the weak queenless hive in the hopes to 1 - Prevent a swarm from the strong hive and 2- Get the weak hive to produce a queen and become stronger.

Also, I added a second deep super to the strong hive just to make sure there was plenty of room to help prevent a swarm.

We'll take a look in  a few weeks to see how things are going.

4-11-2015 Spring Split

The week prior (April 4) the hives were checked for the first time this year and it looked like something bad happened to one of the hives.  There was a pile of dead bees at the bottom of the hive and many dead bees burrowed into the comb.  It looks like these bees maybe froze to death over the very cold winter we had.

Fortunately, the hive with the silver lid still had plenty of bees and the queen was laying with two frames full of brood... So, in order to experiment with trying to get a second hive going ..and try to prevent a swarm, I decided to split the hive.

I took one of the full frames of brood (making sure there were some very young eggs in the frames and ensuring the queen in the original hive was NOT on the frame) I swapped the frame for a frame of honey in the empty hive.  I also swapped a couple other frames as well...  This actually gave the old hive a few frames of honey to get them really cranking.

We'll see in a couple weeks how this turns out.

On another note, I'm seriously thinking about getting a flow hive setup.

7-19-2014 Hive Check

Just a quick note that both hives (although still relatively small) have capped brood and a reasonable number of bees.  The silver topped hive is doing better ... but the newly hatched large mass of bees has depleted most of the honey that was put into the hive for them.  The white topped hive is still very weak, but does have a laying queen... which was a concern last time I checked.

No pictures this time.

7-4-2014 Hive Check

Wanted to check on the progress since it had been a while.

The silver top hive looked to be in pretty good shape with LOTS of capped brood.  The plastic frames had a bit of drawn wax... but not as much as I'd hoped.

The white top hive was in much tougher shape with almost no capped brood... wondering if the queen has been supersceded.

5-31-14 Hive box switch

The experimental hive needed to get moved into a more permanent box... so we combined it with a hive check.

The smaller box was in ok shape considering how few bees they started off with.

The main hive had some nice frames with good brood patterns and should have a decent batch of bees in the next few weeks.

5-24-2014 Checking for queen release

To not use today to check the bees. It looks like both hi released to queens and everything is progressing well. The single package of bees looks to have been split equally between the deep box and the nuc box. Hopefully within the next couple of weeks we will have two full hives.